News and Analysis

10 Things We Saw in the Multi-Location Brand Space in 2023

10 Things We Saw in the Multi-Location Brand Space in 2023

Of course, we’ll be publishing predictions for 2024 and beyond, but here’s a brief recap of some of the major shifts (and tiptoes in new directions) in the MULO (multi-location) brand space in 2023. The pandemic is over…the virus remains…and some shopping and dining trends have forever changed. We’ll detail some of those evolutions (or […]

Study: Higher Allocation to OOH Channel Boosts Performance

Study: Higher Allocation to OOH Channel Boosts Performance

It’s time for media buyers to click their heels together three times and repeat: there’s no place like out-of-home  (OOH). A study of ad-trends data from 2017-2022, the most recent data available, indicated that brands that re-allocated more of their media spending to the OOH channel saw increased effectiveness of campaign performance. Three verticals in […]

BOOM: Dina Mitchell Launches a Gluten-Free MULO Brand

Dina Mitchell was the brain behind The Tropical Smoothie Café brand in Nevada and Southern California. Starting with only 23 locations, the brand grew to 1,300 and Mitchell’s stores clinched several Franchise of the Year awards and she became the Area Developer of the Year. After fifteen years of growth (including a $22 million year) […]

Commentary

What Becomes of Brand Identity in a World of Changing IDs?

Branding is in the eye of the beholder. Or, as Al Ries and Jack Trout’s classic marketing text Positioning, the Battle for your Mind puts it, a brand’s positioning is the space it occupies in the mind of the prospect. Decades of the world’s best marketing leaders and agency pros have rallied around this definition. If it’s true, what happens to measuring brand identity and positioning with the dramatic shift in one of the best attribution tools marketers have ever known?

How Human-to-Human Marketing Can Counter the Labor Shortage and Drive Q4 Growth

In times of economic uncertainty, local communities look to support their own, ensuring businesses stay open and neighborhoods stay strong. What most brands miss is that they are a legitimate part of the community fabric and can leverage their place in that fabric as a marketing and sales asset.

Smart Brand Strategy in an Endemic Era: How to Effectively Gain Trust

The future of brand strategy is all about increasing engagement with quality interactions in a way that inspires loyalty and trust from a brand’s prospective audience.

Latest Posts

Fast Brings New Headless Checkout Capabilities to Live Events

Buyers can purchase a seller’s product in one click, directly from a Fast Checkout button on a review page, an email, or another digital avenue. That means Fast’s new headless checkout system could be a big payday for certain digital publishers and bloggers as well as live events.

Reveal Mobile Acquires OOH Location Intelligence Startup Mira

The acquisition creates what Reveal describes as the first ad tech SaaS platform to provide attribution reports for online-to-offline, offline-to-online, and offline-to-offline marketing campaigns. The company will be bringing Mira’s entire team onboard.

Bluefin Wants to Devalue Your Data

For those not in the know, talk of a company wanting to devalue their company’s data might inspire fears of ruthless competitors coming to steal a precious resource. But in fact, Bluefin, the company whose core mission is devaluing data, does not want to steal your information; it wants to shield your data from that very outcome.

What Becomes of Brand Identity in a World of Changing IDs?

Branding is in the eye of the beholder. Or, as Al Ries and Jack Trout’s classic marketing text Positioning, the Battle for your Mind puts it, a brand’s positioning is the space it occupies in the mind of the prospect. Decades of the world’s best marketing leaders and agency pros have rallied around this definition. If it’s true, what happens to measuring brand identity and positioning with the dramatic shift in one of the best attribution tools marketers have ever known?

How Human-to-Human Marketing Can Counter the Labor Shortage and Drive Q4 Growth

In times of economic uncertainty, local communities look to support their own, ensuring businesses stay open and neighborhoods stay strong. What most brands miss is that they are a legitimate part of the community fabric and can leverage their place in that fabric as a marketing and sales asset.

October Theme: Hybrid Holidays

Last year, facing peak Covid contagion with no vaccines available, Street Fight dubbed its annual month of holiday-related retail and marketing coverage “home for the holidays.” This year, brands face a more uncertain landscape: hybrid holidays.

Smart Brand Strategy in an Endemic Era: How to Effectively Gain Trust

The future of brand strategy is all about increasing engagement with quality interactions in a way that inspires loyalty and trust from a brand’s prospective audience.

LBMA: 605 and PlaceIQ Partner Up

In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers 605 and PlaceIQ’s partnership, Logiq introducing a geofencing platform, Robomart launching a mobile store-hailing platform, and MoodMedia acquiring PlayNetwork.

How Brands Can Rock TikTok to Reach Gen Z

The bottom line for brands is that by being strategic about platform priorities, emphasizing authenticity, and nurturing organic social, marketers can reach the influential Gen Z audience they need to survive and thrive.

Google Local Search Trends III: Socialization

In this third of four installments in my series on recent and ongoing trends in local search, I want to focus on signs that Google’s local platform — comprising Google My Business, Google Maps, and the local component of Google Search — has become, under our noses, a massive social network. Google has achieved this status not through traditional methods of connecting users to each other, but by allowing and encouraging users to share their experiences, questions, and opinions about local businesses in a variety of forms and at a massive scale.