Does Ulta Need to Get the Flock Out of Here? | Fast Five Shorts

Ulta Beauty is facing a social media backlash this week after an activist campaign went viral criticizing the retailer's use of Flock Safety's automated license plate reader technology at a small number of its stores.

According to Retail Dive, social media users flooded Ulta's Instagram post this week after a campaign by activist group Ultraviolet.

Cool name.

Went viral criticizing Ulta's relationship with surveillance tech provider Flock.

The technology is deployed at fewer than 1% of Ulta's roughly 1500 store fleet nationwide, and a source told Retail Dive the cameras do not use facial recognition.

Flock has faced growing public criticism and vandalism of its license plate readers in recent months, with some state and local governments reconsidering the technology's use.

Flock's website also lists organized retail crime as a use case, and Ulta's director of organized retail crime has said the retailer sought the technology to, quote, help bridged the gap, end quote, with law enforcement after a rise in store violence following the pandemic.

Neither Ulta nor Flock, however, responded to Retail Dive's detailed questions about the relationship.

Shelly Alta is framing this internally as an organized retail crime tool, but the online reaction is treating it as surveillance overreach.

Is the viral backlash appropriate or is Ulta just an easy target amid the broader anti surveillance movement movement?

Well, this is an interesting topic today, and I'll probably say this very directly.

Yeah, a retailer should not deploy technology like this unless they can actually explain it.

And I think this is an example of really bad external and internal comms where there should have been a strategy around how to talk to consumers about this.

And so what is even more interesting is they had an opportunity to start that discussion with Retail Dive and then they refused to comment as well.

So this is kind of leaving it very opaque for everybody to understand exactly what's happening.

But a retailer does have a responsibility to protect not only the people that work at its retail locations, but also customers.

And when we talk about surveillance, and I'd be curious about your perspective, Chris, is like, where do we draw the line?

Because we've had cameras outside of malls during holiday times forever in order to protect people against theft.

And so for me, this is not like a safety privacy question.

It's what is being captured, what data is being captured, for how long, and how do you explain to your consumers and people shopping at your stores what is happening?

And so, yeah, I think it's interesting because I think it's more of a communication problem than I think it is a surveillance problem.

Yeah.

And it's a tough Communications problem, too, right, Shelly?

It's a hard one to know how to get out in front of from a communication standpoint, too.

So my feel goes out to the PR teams as well, because it's hard to know how to couch this.

Like, I think of.

We had a similar conversation.

Ben Miller, on Grocer Talk, he talked about Sainsbury's use of facial recognition, which is going, you know, a step beyond, because Flack doesn't apparently use facial recognition.

It's just reading license plates.

But, you know, Ben, you know, Ben was all for it for the reasons you said, because it was, you know, designed to help keep employees safer.

But yet then they had a false positive where they accused somebody of shoplifting, and then social media blew up on it.

And it was like one of those things where I was like, yeah, I personally, I don't know if I'd be.

I'd be touching this.

But then I come back on the flip side of it and go, yeah, but at the end of the day, I need to protect my store employees.

Like, I need to do that.

So I've got to figure out a way to do it.

And so I think if you're.

If you're going to deploy this type of tech, you either one, have to know your communication strategy to your point, or you've got to stand your ground and be ready for the backlash and give the rationale for why are you using it.

But I think you have to tread cautiously still and dip your toe into it, which is my hunch.

My hunch is that all these technologies are being deployed in this way.

The question I have, too, is, are they really moving the needle and are they worth art?

Is the juice, worth the squeeze on them?

In terms of the social media backlash and the distraction for the comms teams internally in your organizations, I think those are the questions you have to ask, because detection and prevention are two really different things.

And I'm still not sure I've seen a silver bullet on how do you actually prevent versus how do you just detect?

But I don't know.

What do you think, Shelley?

I think that's right.

I think technology is going to be deployed at a faster rate than ever in the past in retail.

So the point is, be transparent about it and have a plan.

In the age that we're living in now, we can't just deploy things and not communicate them and not be transparent about them, because there's too many of our consumer bases that are now in communities talking to each other, picking up on things.

And so if you don't create your own narrative.

The basics, right?

If you don't create your own narrative, somebody else is going to create it for you.

So I think the punchline here is the technology could be great.

It needs to be tested more.

There have been misuses of it.

It's great that they're trying it out in 1% of their stores.

They need to get more data on it, but they didn't have a plan.

And so I think that's the big lesson here for other retailers that may follow suit in deploying similar types of surveillance technology.

But Shelly, at the same time, like, and a former, as a former CEO, I'm curious, cause I don't know the answer to this question either that I'm about to ask you is like, what does that mean for pilot implementations?

Like this is in 1% of stores.

Like the comp scheme's gotta be very dialed in on what the innovation teams or the tech teams are trying to learn by executing small tests in stores too.

Because it sounds like if you get that wrong, it can blow up.

So are you saying then that the comps team's got to get more involved in innovation?

I think one of the most strategic roles that companies have to have now is communications.

And I think that those roles are starting to report directly to CEOs for that reason.

Because you have two things kind of happening at once.

You have a more rapid iteration of customer experiences which I think this falls into.

Consumers are obviously experiencing this surveillance when they come into the parking lot.

And then you also have a need for increased communication with your associates.

So both internal and external comms have become so much more strategic, the need for those in recent years.

And so I think that that role is so strategic, more and more reporting to the CEO and I think they absolutely have to be involved in every facet of the business and understand what's launching and if it's visible to a consumer, there should be plan around it.

That's a really good point too.

Like for those listening too, especially people gravitated with like what's next in my career with the dawn of AI, that seems like a, in some ways an AI proof job too.

And a job that would require more knowledge of the hands on operations of how the retailer works day in and day out.

So it actually may be a good way to transition for a career too as you're thinking about it.

Like, you know, hey, do I start going into comms if I've been in merchandising at some point, you know, because I, I have the chops that help me understand what's actually being talked about here.

That's.

That's a really interesting insight, Shelly.