PlaceIQ’s New Service Looks to Give Brands the Full Competitive Picture
As more and more brands invest in location-based marketing campaigns, there’s a crucial need to zoom out and see the big picture. This means connecting the dots on a grand scale and knowing not only if consumers are checking in and making those crucial in-store purchases — but also knowing how they spend the rest of their time, and where you stand to get the best ROI.
In an effort to bring marketers to this full circle moment, PlaceIQ today is unveiling LandMark, a new data-as-a-service capability that allows brands access to their location-based audience and insights platform, and basically a sprawling network of data.
“Our whole focus as a company is around building reality-based consumer behaviors,” says Duncan McCall, CEO and co-founder of PlaceIQ. “We’ve now taken that huge dataset and understanding of billions of opted-in location-enabled smartphone [movements] to build a very big analytics database. LandMark is an expression of all the intelligence and knowledge that can be queried in multiple ways and output in a series of ways.”
It sounds complicated, and certainly it is complex. Here’s an example McCall provided of one way it which LandMark can serve brands, in this case, a brand like JetBlue.
JetBlue can view all its terminals in every airport. Nothing you couldn’t do already, but LandMark looks to take the journey many levels deeper, by laying out a map of not only who has checked into your terminals, but also, the other places they’re visiting, what hotels they stay at, where they eat, and even (without violating privacy laws) the vicinity in which they live.
This is possible because these consumers have opted-in to location settings via any number of apps, such as “news apps, weather apps, gaming apps,” says McCall. “Thousands and thousands of apps have users turning on location and that data gets anonymously shared with us. It’s a huge ecosystem.”
Ecosystem is the key word here. JetBlue, to go with that same example, has a snapshot of exactly where they fall in this vast environment. What they can do with that big picture view is pinpoint areas of strengths and weaknesses. Ideally, they can sharpen their competitive edge, and deepen bonds with current and prospective flyers.
“There’s many different applications for this,” said McCall. “Think of advertisers and media agencies. You can speak to people who fly Alaska Airlines differently than you would to people who fly American Airlines by [accessing] this real data [all in one place]. So, rather than constructing a campaign using location as a target, you can use this to define strategies and ultimately to understand how to execute a successful campaign.”
The airline example works well because how people fly and travel can be so representative of the type of person they are. Do they fly for business or pleasure? Do they stay at the Hilton or Best Western? Do they travel often or once in a while? Syncing all these location-based data points enables competitive intelligence and also the opportunity to forge partnerships with other brands your consumers favor.
While any brand could probably use these kind of comprehensive analytics, McCall says that at present, this service is best for bigger brands. That said, these big brands can zero in on specific data points with the goal of understanding shopper behavior and patterns as expressed via foot traffic.
“Let’s imagine you have a chain of three Jiffy Lubes, you can look at [the following]: Where are customers coming from? How big is my catchment area? Who are my top competitors? You can even determine what is their income, age, household size, CPG purchase behavior, and television viewership,” says McCall.
Nicole Spector is a Street Fight contributor.
