Читать книгу Location-Based Marketing - Gérard Cliquet - Страница 19

Consumer behavior can no longer be considered in the same way once space is taken into account. Too little marketing research has considered this spatial dimension in consumer behavior and this requires a revisit to geography (Golledge and Stimson 1997; Golledge 1999).

A few articles have been able to advance knowledge in this area. Work based on reference dependence theory (Tversky and Kahneman 1991; Tversky and Simonson 1993) has led to a better understanding of consumer shopping trips (Brooks et al. 2004; Brewer 2007) (see Chapter 2).

Older work has been carried out on the basis of gravity and/or spatial interaction models (Reilly 1931; Huff 1964; Nakanishi and Cooper 1974).

Increased consumer mobility, their ability to use so-called mobile technologies (smartphones and tablets) and changes in retail offers, physical or virtual stores on the Internet, are accelerating ubiquitous purchasing processes. This evolution makes gravity-based models less efficient even if they are far from useless, if only in the definition of certain geofencing applications, that is, the determination of the attraction or trading area. This technique is described as an extreme form of marketing location and is increasingly used to send promotional offers in the form of coupons to consumers who are either in the store or near the point of sale using SMS on their smartphone (Mattioli and Bustillo 2012). In other words, the issue here is how far away should current or potential customers of promotional offers be alerted, on their smartphone or tablet, when they pass “near” the store or more generally on opportunities that may interest them. Chapter 5 will deal with geofencing.

Consumers are increasingly capable of mobility without it increasing overall: retailers and traders must adapt to it (Vizard 2013). Sometimes it is quite easy. For example, a distributor near the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border found that residents of New Hampshire may not pay the vehicle taxes required in Massachusetts (Banos et al. 2015). He therefore placed an order with a company specializing in geofencing to include all potential customers in New Hampshire in his database. But this is again a gravity-type attraction (Reilly 1931; Huff 1964; Cliquet 1988).

When we want to attract customers who pass near a point of sale, otherwise known as taking advantage of the flows of the temporary attraction (Cliquet 1997a), the operation is more delicate. Indeed, how can this proximity be evaluated? This concept of proximity has become central to the thinking of major retailers, for example. For many years now, people have been wondering about the future of these “shoe boxes”, known as hypermarkets, a store format invented in France in 1963 by Carrefour and copied in many countries, including the United States in the 1990s (Europe can also sometimes be a little ahead). But hypermarkets are increasingly neglected, especially the largest ones, because they no longer meet the needs of customers seeking both purchasing power and another way of life that is less consumer-oriented. Will smartphones and geo-fencing (Streed et al. 2013) be able to save them?