Читать книгу Location-Based Marketing - Gérard Cliquet - Страница 21

Once potential targets have been identified by the spatial study of behavior, the marketing strategy can be defined. Taking the environment into account can lead to the dilemma already mentioned: local versus global. This contextualization can be troublesome, and has been for a long time, because it can lead to conflicting options that can damage the brand image. However, digital mobility tools can partly solve this dilemma by improving customer contact. This evolution implies a better consideration of the link between production and distribution, in other words, logistics. In order to solve the problem of the optimal compromise between quality and cost (and therefore price), effective coordination becomes essential, and only flawless logistics can make this possible. However, logistics also has a cost, and reducing it requires a rigorous control of space by controlling the distribution of products and therefore thanks to a good spatial distribution of sales outlets. We will see that this spatial dissemination of customer contact points implies a different way of thinking about the spatial strategies for setting up sales units, stores, restaurants, hotels, etc., through, for example, the application of percolation theory (Cliquet and Guillo 2013).

This problem of spatial coverage of point of sale networks does not only affect retailing. It is also of interest to manufacturers; some of them have found that traditional media no longer allow contact with the consumer as effectively as before. As the American firm Procter & Gamble has found, individuals now have technical possibilities to bypass advertising on their TV sets or to avoid spam in their mailboxes (Arzoumanian 2005). However, points of sale are now a safer medium: in 2005, Procter & Gamble observed that in the United States, 100,000,000 customers visited Walmart stores every week, 22,000,000 visited Home Depot stores and 42,000,000 visited 7-Eleven convenience stores. Under these conditions, the best located chains are better media than TV or Internet advertising. Moreover, Zara, the Spanish clothing company, has never advertized in the traditional sense and uses its own stores as promotional media. Procter & Gamble had even thought of launching its own chain of stores selling all the company's products, but had to give it up: P&G is primarily a manufacturing company, and retailing is a quite different job.