Weekly Retail Brand Pulse: Foot Traffic Digest for Investors

Every Monday at 7am ET (cron trigger), produce a weekly retail brand pulse for our investment team that compares foot traffic across a watchlist of public retail chains and emails the narrative to the analyst distribution list.

On first run, ask the user for three inputs and remember them: (1) the watchlist of Placer.ai chain entities to cover, (2) the Gmail recipient list (To, Cc) for the analyst distro, and (3) the Notion parent page where archive entries live (a page titled something like "Brand Pulse").

Each Monday run, the agent should:

1. Pull data from Placer.ai for the configured chain entities over the trailing 13 weeks. Call the "Visit Trends Report" operation with weekly granularity to get the time series for each chain. Call the "Visit Metrics Summary Report" operation across the same chains for an at-a-glance week-over-week and year-over-year delta. Call the "Ranking Index - Top Ranked" operation to surface category leaders and laggards within the relevant chain category. Remember Placer's async pattern: a 202 response means the report is still being generated, so retry the same request body until you get a 200.

2. Synthesize a written analyst-grade digest. Open with one paragraph on the overall read of the week across the watchlist. Then call out the top three accelerating brands and top three decelerating brands, each with the magnitude (week-over-week % and year-over-year %) and a short likely-driver hypothesis (promo cadence, seasonality, weather, news, category rotation). Close with a ranking movement section that names the biggest climbers and fallers from the Ranking Index. Keep it concise enough to read on a phone before the market opens.

3. Format the digest as an email with a clean subject line like "Retail Brand Pulse — Week of {Monday date}" and send it via the Gmail "Send a Message" operation to the configured analyst distribution list. Use a readable HTML body with the brand names, deltas, and hypotheses clearly laid out.

4. Append the same digest as a dated child page under the Brand Pulse parent in Notion via the "Create a Page" operation, titled with the week-of date so the team has a running archive to look back at. Include the full narrative plus a simple table of every chain on the watchlist with its WoW% and YoY%.

Tone: this is for buy-side and sell-side analysts using foot traffic as a real-time read on revenue, so be direct, quantitative, and avoid hype. If a chain has no data for a given week, note it and move on rather than fabricating a hypothesis.

Additional information

What does this prompt do?

Tracks weekly foot traffic across the public retail chains your analysts cover, with 13 weeks of context.
Calls out the week's top accelerating and decelerating brands with plain-English magnitudes and likely-driver hypotheses.
Emails the narrative digest to your analyst distribution list every Monday morning before the open.
Files the same digest as a dated child page under your Brand Pulse parent page in Notion so the team always has a running archive.

What do I need to use this?

A Placer.ai account with API access enabled by your customer success manager.
A Gmail account that can send to your analyst distribution list.
A Notion workspace and a Brand Pulse parent page where new weekly entries can live.
Your watchlist of public retail chains, the email recipients, and the Notion parent page link to configure on first run.

How can I customize it?

Swap the watchlist of chains to match your sector coverage, from QSR to off-price apparel to sporting goods.
Change the send time, day of week, or trailing window if your team prefers a Sunday night read or a longer 26 week view.
Adjust the recipient list, the subject line format, or the parent page in Notion so the archive fits your existing research filing structure.
Tune how many accelerating and decelerating brands to call out, or have the digest add a category leaders and laggards section.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a Placer.ai subscription to use this?

Yes. Placer.ai is a paid product, and API access is a separate add-on you request from your customer success manager. Once that is enabled, you connect the account once and the workflow handles the rest.

Can I send the digest somewhere other than email?

Yes. The default is a Gmail send to your analyst distribution list plus an archive entry in Notion. You can route it to a different inbox, add Slack, or skip the Notion archive when you set the workflow up.

Will this work for private companies or only public chains?

Placer.ai tracks foot traffic for any brand it has coverage for, public or private. The prompt is framed for buy-side and sell-side analysts watching public tickers, but you can put any chain on the watchlist.

How does it decide which brands are accelerating or decelerating?

It looks at week over week and year over year changes from Placer's visit metrics, ranks the watchlist, and surfaces the biggest movers in both directions with the magnitude and a short hypothesis on why.

How is this different from a daily foot traffic alert?

A daily alert pings you when a single venue crosses a threshold. This is a weekly narrative built for an investment team, ranking chain-level momentum across a watchlist and telling the story in an email.