Location Is King When Marketing

University of Pennsylvania Wharton School marketing professor David Bell was being interviewed on my local NPR station about his recently released book, and I just happened to catch the tail end of the show. Learning the full title, “Location Is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One,” intrigued me even more. I immediately ordered a copy.

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Richard VanVranken

Waiting for the book to arrive, I started postulating what it might tell me about produce marketing. Location is certainly still important in real world retailing — whether we’re talking about a farm stand (a busy suburban intersection has more potential customers than a farm lane 10 miles out of town) — or the placement of product on the grocer’s shelves.

Prime Location For Produce
Fresh produce is the biggest draw for grocers, and is usually the first thing you run into upon entering most stores.

What’s displayed front, center, and at eye level throughout? Those prime locations are filled with bright, colorful, high-margin seasonal items that might not be on every shopping list, but every customer has to pass by them to get to the staples near the back.

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Could it also be about how critical your online ‘location’ is? The likelihood of shoppers finding you if your website doesn’t show up on the first page of a search has made Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a big business. Tweaking your keywords can increase social media visibility and move your website up to that first screen.

The term “location marketing” is also making news as our increasingly mobile online presence can provide opportunities to push offers and coupons directly to your smart phones as you move around a store.

However, in “Location Is (Still) Everything,” professor Bell reveals that successful online marketing can be improved by understanding the attributes of your potential customers, which likely has as much to do with their physical location, i.e. where they live, as yours.

Pulled In Many Directions
Bell uses his and others’ research to illustrate how the “theory of (commercial) gravity” impacts our real-world lives much in the same way as Newton’s Theory. Larger metropolitan areas have more cultural and shopping opportunities and are more “attractive,” i.e. have more gravitational pull than do smaller communities. That, in turn, affects how you shop for products and information online.

If you live in a larger city, you have easier (physical) access to a variety of places to shop, so you are more likely to use the Internet for gathering information than for making purchases.

On the other hand, the Internet may offer more selection, faster delivery, or better prices for the suburban/rural dwellers than the more limited selection of real-world stores in their smaller communities. For example, my choices for purchasing “Location Is (Still) Everything” were to:

  • Drive approximately 20 minutes to a local book store where they would likely have to special order it, probably taking the typical “six to eight weeks” to arrive;
  • Drive an hour into Philadelphia, find and pay for parking (and a bridge toll on the way), to visit the University of Pennsylvania campus bookstore which would likely be featuring a new book by one of its own faculty; or
  • Purchase the book online.

The limited options in my town (small gravitational pull) and the hassles and costs of driving into Philadelphia (large gravitational pull, especially with a high likelihood of immediately finding the book) made an offer from an online bookseller to send it in two to three weeks the most attractive option.

Your gravitational pull, whether to your farm market or to your wholesale produce, is influenced by the uniqueness (commodity/niche), quality (freshness), size (value/volume), and location (distance/ease of access) of your product or service in relation to the pull of alternatives where your potential customers live.

“Location Is (Still) Everything” will help you understand how customers’ locations impact the possibility of them searching you out, and can help you determine where to target your marketing efforts.

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