rights of Gérard Cliquet and Jérôme Baray to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957599
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-580-0
Preface
This book is a follow-up to the book Geomarketing: Methods and Strategies in Spatial Marketing published by the publisher ISTE (London) in 2006, then translated into Chinese in 2012 (translation by Pan Yu and Gao Li) under the title
This new opus is no longer a collective work, but the work of a single author who has tried to bring together the main concepts, methods and strategies to implement marketing that takes space into account.
It therefore not only emphasizes the importance of mapping in marketing decision making, but also seeks to highlight the importance of a more spatialized vision of these marketing decisions in order to better reflect the realities of markets, whether local or international.
The technological progress made and more particularly the arrival of mobile tools from information and communication technology (ICT), especially tablets and smartphones, have led the author to take an interest in the specificities of geolocation, to use this pleonastic expression. For a long time, location was reserved for buildings with an economic purpose, such as factories (Weber 1909; Merenne-Schoumaker 2002) or shops (Huff 1964; Applebaum 1966). Now, it is individuals and, with regard to marketing, consumers who can be geolocated and whom it is possible to address directly via email, SMS or even social media, which makes it possible to boost marketing strategies. ICT is disrupting the daily lives of consumers and practitioners, whether retailers or industrialists. Many companies have not yet taken advantage of the opportunities offered by these technologies, and when they have acknowledged them, they are still looking for ways to use them to improve contact with their customers. These developments do not take place without raising legal issues of privacy concerns, which will also be mentioned, as the academic community has been addressing these risks very early on.
This book offers a synthesis of knowledge concerning consumer behavior, the elements of the marketing mix with of course store location in a specific section, and therefore these new aspects related to geolocation that the integration of geolocation systems in new ICT tools allows.
The author sincerely thanks Jérôme Baray, Professor at the University of New Caledonia in Nouméa, Dany Vyt, Associate Professor at the IGR-IAE and Pierre-Alain Guillo, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics, both at the University of Rennes, for their comments. He is also very grateful to the company Articque for the supply of maps that will found in this book, as well as to Mr. Philippe Latour for the supply of an illustration from his company Spatialist.
Gérard CLIQUET
January 2020
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:
– location issues, including- points of sale for retailers;- private institutions (factories, head offices, warehouses, etc.) or public institutions (town halls, administrations, departmental or regional buildings);
– localized marketing, including- at the local level, micromarketing – marketing applied locally to individuals whose characteristics related to their location are known;- at the international level, macromarketing –
