The Power of Re-Location

Location-based marketing is a hot topic, especially among mobile marketers.  However, chatter about smartphone-based features and services distracts from a bigger and more compelling aspect of this change.

In the days before the Walmart-ization of America, small merchants sold virtually everything we purchased.

The growth of “big box” stores has brought us more goods and services far more cheaply than fragmented, small merchants (or even mid-sized chains) could provide.

But in that transition, we lost specialized, local-oriented offers.  We can now get that back in some measure, and merchants and marketers who understand it earliest and best will benefit the most.

The re-localization of commerce will not instantly take us back to small-town, one-off merchants.  The benefits of scale are simply too great.

Social media and mobile can allow companies to decentralize some measure of control over:

• What product or service is featured (note: not purchased by buyers, but featured or discounted)
• When promotions are run
• How promotions are presented

Imagine a large corporate franchise entity establishing five offers for the month of March.  Local or regional managers are then charged with figuring out, in real time, which offers to present, and how to present them.

So a BigCo manager in Duluth could leverage a shovel and free sidewalk salt promotion during an unusually snowy March.  And if March weather is especially warm in Kansas, the Kansas City BigCo manager can use the “Spring Yard Prep” offer.

And digital localization can go far beyond these simple, weather-related examples.  Local managers’ perceptions, data and customer conversations can also be re-integrated with marketing on a granular level, every day.  Rural towns tend to have higher MySpace use, while urban areas favor Facebook.  A University community might be provide heavy Twitter traffic.  A store with a disproportionate number of younger customers could leverage SMS.  Choosing the method of sharing offers further optimizes results.

This week in Minnesota, it was a particularly depressing Monday following an overtime loss by the Minnesota Vikings.  Clever marketing by Punch Pizza leveraged that event with a consoling free pizza offer, pushed through Twitter.

Aaron Weiche provides an excellent recap of the method and the results — check out his blog post.  (In a comment, Aaron Landry added credit where credit was due to Tunheim Partners.)

Now imagine if both small companies like Punch and mid- to large-size companies had the infrastructure in place to enable this kind of instant promotion, deliver it to every web-enabled mobile device, and get reporting in minutes (including which social media outlets performed best).  That’s the potential of re-localization.

Photo credits: La Citta Vita, Punch Pizza