News and Analysis
Holiday Blur: Retail Merchandise Accelerates
As of this writing, the trees, menorahs, and tinsel are still in living rooms and consumers have barely finished recycling their wrapping boxes, washing dishes from their December feasts, and returning from family visits. The ball in Times Square hasn’t dropped. And yet, retail merchandise for upcoming holidays is already on the shelves at many […]
Ethan Chernofsky of Placer.ai on the Omnichannel Experience
One word we’ve seen non-stop in the MULO (multi-location) space over the past five years is OMNICHANNEL. Smartphones, the pandemic, and Amazon all accelerated this shopping style. The consumer not only decides which brands they like and what products they need (or want) but also how they want to buy them, pick them up, and […]
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 […]
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
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.
Yelp Introduces Guest Manager, A Front-of-House Operations Tool for Restaurants
Yelp today introduced a new, comprehensive solution for restaurants to manage their front-of-house operations. With online searches for takeout remaining above pre-pandemic levels, the new Yelp Guest Manager is being billed as a comprehensive solution that brings together many of the digital tools restaurants have been using to manage digital ordering, reservations, takeout, guest loyalty, and table management.
Broadening Local: Expert Roundup
A trio of local search experts expound on the latest in the industry. Claire Carlile proposes Google My Business as a CMS and covers how businesses should approach the channel; Miriam Ellis explores the increasingly blurred lines between different categories of sites and businesses; and Damian Rollison delineates the major trends shaping the trajectory of local search, especially on Google.



















































Why AI Describes Locations Differently