How to choose a location intelligence company

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, decision-making has become increasingly complex. Organizations across industries are constantly seeking new ways to gain a competitive edge and optimize their operations. One invaluable tool that has emerged to empower these businesses is location intelligence. By leveraging the power of location data, businesses can unlock valuable insights, identify trends, and make informed strategic decisions. However, with the abundance of location intelligence companies in the market, selecting the right partner can be a daunting task. For today’s retailers choosing the perfect location intelligence company is crucial to achieving their organizational goals.

The capabilities of location intelligence 

The most fundamental use of location insight is in helping your brand select locations that are most likely to perform well. Forecasting models lean on a myriad of data points around customers, locations, competitors, and situational characteristics to provide projections on proposed locations and potential performance.  

By utilizing the full capabilities of location analytics, retailers can answer strategic questions, including; 

• Which locations offer the best opportunity 
• How do co-tenants impact a locations performance 
• What is the impact of opening new locations on an existing site 

• How does my online channel impact my brick-and-mortar sales 
• Which markets should I enter next 
• Who are customers and where are they coming from  

For executives keen to maximize return on investment decisions, actionable insight that allows you to prioritize locations and markets with the greatest potential is vital. 

Picking the right location intelligence company

There are plenty of location intelligence companies out there, ranging from high-touch consultancy to plug-and-play platform offerings. To determine which option is right for you, you need to first figure out which questions you want to use location intelligence to answer. Once you know those, you can seek out suppliers with a successful record of answering those same questions with brands of similar scale and maturity to your own. 

It’s also crucial you begin appraising the resources you have internally across departments that are likely to use location intelligence. This will enable you to figure out your capacity levels, allowing you to pick suppliers capable of filling your gaps in resources.  

Finally, be wary of oversimplified solutions. Many plug-and-play providers work on black box models that offer no visibility on how particular results arrive at. Other operators rely heavily on one data source, such as mobility, which is highly susceptible to generating flawed conclusions. 

A limited dataset can result in a misleading recommendation. As an example, Massive Mobile Data, or enhanced cellphone location data, can be a helpful tool in understanding customer patronage patterns. However, leveraging Massive Mobile Data for a specific location to ascertain current shopping patterns is not immediately applicable to a proposed use, since it may have a different customer profile, competitive environment, or nearby sister store location. 

Once you carefully consider the balance of these varied factors, you’ll be in the best possible position to pick a location intelligence company.

The Kalibrate approach 

For decades, Kalibrate has worked with some of the world’s biggest retail brands, providing them with the insight they need to understand their customers, competitors, and markets. 

Our approach to location intelligence pulls together highly configurable platform capabilities, best-in-class analytics, and consultancy services. Taken together, our approach to deploying location intelligence with our clients falls into three buckets, each designed to meet a different level of internal resources and business requirements 

Do it for me 

This is for retailers that need a comprehensively consultative approach. They do not need a location intelligence platform. We collate the data, build the models, and deliver the outputs with accompanying support in interpretating the ‘so what?’ of the results. 

Do it with me 

In these scenarios, we meet retailers in the middle – assisting with data collation, model build, and implementation in our location intelligence platform. We also provide consultancy style support on interpreting outputs and extracting maximum value from your platform. 

Do it myself 

For businesses that have extensive data science and analytics capabilities, we offer our highly configurable platform and comprehensive implementation along with ongoing support. 

This article is a sample of Kalibrate’s recent report – “Unlocking the Full Power of Location Intelligence” 

Download the report here