Location-Based Marketing. Gérard Cliquet

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      Introduction

      This book attempts to take stock of knowledge and applications in an evolving field. It focuses on aspects related to the discipline of marketing, while others provide a broader vision of digital geography applications, using computer science, in management sciences (Caron 2017). Digital geography has also been implemented in many fields such as weather, military strategy and environmental crisis monitoring (Plantin 2014).

Research based on spatial considerations began in economics as early as the 19th Century (von Thünen 1826; Weber 1909). Publications published around the 1930s would leave their mark on the economy (Hotelling 1929) and marketing (Reilly 1931) for a long time, alongside the work of geographers of the time (Christaller 1933; Lösch 1941). But the importance of the “geography of marketing” began to be recognized in the 1960s (Revzan 1968). This evolution also marks the birth of retailing (Scott 1970), that is, the activity of selling goods in stores or on the Internet¹. Chapter 4 of this book will be entirely devoted to georetailing.

      The interest of multidisciplinary research, particularly of course with geography, lies in the possibility of bringing out the determinants and models of store location by linking business units and geographical elements and highlighting their evolution. This takes into account population disparities within regions, changes in the urban economy with spatial interactions within market areas and trading areas, while taking into account competition, commodity flows and geographical barriers. But only store location specialists, retailers, will continue in this direction, with traditional marketing remaining largely aspatial. However, Chapters 2 and 3 will show that all marketing can be impacted by the need to spatialize studies, especially since recent technological advances in mapping.

English speakers do not normally use the word geomarketing, instead making a distinction between GIS (geographic information systems), geodemographics, which is the study of people according to their place of residence (Johnson 1997; Gonzàlez-Benito et al. 2007), and micromarketing, which is defined as the customization of marketing mix variables at the store level (Montgomery 1997; Swinyard 1997). Finding English language sources for geomarketing is therefore not always easy. This book will help the reader in this respect by providing him or her with a large number of bibliographical references.

      In terms of geomarketing considered as a set of techniques to map many social phenomena, as we will see, we could also go back in time and recall the role of the Belgian Gérard de Kreme, known as Gérardus Mercator, who invented mapping in the 16th Century (Horst 2011). In the 18th Century, the first map of the Kingdom of France was drawn by the Cassini family and this work, based on geodesic triangulation, lasted more than 60 years. Today, we still consult Cassini’s map for historical works. And, older readers will surely remember the geography courses and maps of Vidal de la Blache (often called Vidal-Lablache).

      But while geomarketing is a set of mapping techniques, spatial marketing is above all a much broader field, not only in methodological terms, but also and above all in conceptual and theoretical terms, which should enable private or public organizations to define more precise and appropriate strategies: space is not only geographical, it is also economic, cultural and institutional if we break down the notion of distance according to the Uppsala model (Johanson and Wiedersheim-Paul 1975).

      This is why this book talks about spatial marketing, because mapping, which is important and central to the notion of geomarketing, is not the only technique that makes it possible to control space in marketing decisions. Spatial marketing therefore concerns all of the following: