When you think of technology and commercial real estate, you might picture enormous brands like Starbucks building algorithms to determine where to put their next 50 stores. However, technology is an increasingly important tool when it comes to the growth of emerging brands, and businesses of all sizes are taking advantage of the increasing availability of data and analytics tools to make informed decisions about their brand’s future.
Location Intelligence is a discipline that businesses utilize to implement technology, data, and market knowledge and create growth strategies. Technology and data can be used at every point in the real estate process.
Macroeconomic View of Your Brand’s Strategy
From small towns in Texas to Times Square, no market is created equal, and no brand will fit in every market – but the market you choose will not just have an impact on your success but on your brand’s character as well. Through a combination of data analysis and market knowledge, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is essential for understanding how data interacts with the physical world.
Mapping technology can help you learn about and summarize market data from the highest level down to the street level, giving you the information most needed to make well-informed decisions while growing your brand
Finding Your Customer
Demographics are an important part of any market analysis, both when evaluating a market’s suitability for your brand, and after you’ve landed in your next market.
By utilizing mapping technology, you can quickly analyze a combination of demographic summary and consumer characteristics to assess the geography, history, and character of a city. No city is the same, but it’s possible to recreate your brand’s success (or correct past mistakes) by analyzing the demographic and psychographic profile of your current customer and searching for that customer in new markets.
Using the knowledge of where your customers live, how they move through the market, and where they like to spend their money, you can build a market plan that’s specially designed for your brand.
Utilizing Cell Phone Data
Wondering who lives within 15 minutes of your proposed new location? Curious about their habits? Want to understand the financial demographics of surrounding neighborhoods? Cell phone data works at the microeconomic level, helping you to determine not only the best part of town for your next location, but also which center has the greatest market reach, how possible co-tenants stack up against the rest of their brand’s portfolio, and even how a proposed location may compare to existing competitors.
This type of real-time “big data” is compiled by companies that specialize in processing this data.
The granularity of cell phone data helps to overcome some of the challenges associated with traditional geographic data, letting you know not just who lives within 15 minutes of a proposed store, but who actually shops there, where they live, where they work, and where they come from.
Once you start using this type of data, you’ll feel blind without it.
For more information on how technology can be used to build your brand, contact The Retail Strategy at info@theretailstrategy.com.