Oscar Quine is a journalist who has written for leading media outlets, such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent, on a range of issues including technology.

Though COVID-19 has seen many Americans stay at home, tech giants are banking on people moving around in the future, with Apple and Google announcing significant upgrades to their map interfaces in the summer of 2020. Apple’s high-detail offering, which includes a Street View-like ‘look around’ feature and information on bicycling routes, will be rolled out in the UK, Ireland, and Canada in the fall having already been deployed in the US and Japan. Meanwhile, Google Maps will incorporate information on pavement widths, pedestrian crossings, and road widths – all crucial for those with accessibility needs – as well as greater detail on its UI. 

Such upgrades reflect the changing expectations of users, who increasingly rely on mapping apps to provide a navigable – and ‘shoppable’ – interface for the world around them. With more than a billion people using Google Maps alone, the tech holds great potential to gain insights into consumer behavior. 

 Recognizing this commercial opportunity, Google and Apple have worked to reposition their apps as ‘local search’ tools. As well as guiding people from A to B, Google Maps can be used to book hotels and restaurants, hire taxis, and place delivery orders. Advances in the geographic information system (GIS) technology that underpins these apps have correspondingly increased the scope for brands to use mapping for commercial purposes, with various products allowing them to easily build maps to visualize location-specific data, while client-friendly interfaces let company representatives input and alter datasets with ease. 

The progression of mapping tech over the past decade has led to profound shifts in consumer behavior as companies built on GIS have developed new ways of interacting with the environment. In 2019, Uber users globally took an estimated 6.9 billion trips, and running app Strava recorded a billion activity uploads in the 13 months to February 2020. 

 These platforms enable people to guide, enhance, and – as with the case of 

 – gamify their real-world interactions. Their success reflects the narrowing gap between the online and offline. While e-commerce continues to grow – reportedly accounting for 14.1% of all retail sales worldwide in 2019 – many people still prefer to complete purchases in brick-and-mortar locations, with research carried out in February 2019 revealing that 83% of US shoppers who visited a store in the previous week did so after conducting an online search. 

 So, how can brands harness mapping technologies to deliver optimized omnichannel experiences?

Brick-and-mortar locations and geospatial marketing

As early as 2009, WPP founder Martin Sorrell proclaimed that location-based marketing was the ‘holy grail’ for advertisers. 

 While this promise has not been fulfilled in the decade since, we may be at a tipping point. Chris Tucker, the chairman of the American Geographical Society, claimed that 2018 would be the year that ‘cliché’ tech trends – such as big data, AI, and software as a service – would fuse with GIS tech to make something “new and powerful.” 

 Through advances in GIS, maps have increasingly become the interface through which people combine the real and digital worlds. Hinting at this shift, Google announced in 2017 that US searches for local places without the qualifier ‘near me’ had grown by 150% over two years. 

Geospatial data is not simply about an individual’s location. It uses a wider spread of information to give a richer picture of customer experiences. By overlaying datasets to maps and incorporating location-specific info, brands are able to distinguish the characteristics that define their best customers, ’prospect’ for customers more precisely, and accurately target them with up-selling and cross-selling promotions. Kristopher Kean, the head of real estate and retail at 

, says that businesses can use location data “as the connective thread to reveal hidden patterns, improve predictive modeling, and create a competitive edge... to achieve [a brand’s] goals, whether they are financial, operational, or strategic.” 

 Several companies, such as Starbucks and Sainsbury’s, draw heavily on geospatial data in this regard, looking at factors such as population density, average income, traffic patterns, local public transport, and nearby competitors before signing a store lease.

Inventory decisions can also be informed in this way – from Sainsbury’s stocking more barbeque products during periods of good weather to pharmacy chain Walgreens using geospatial data to help customers calculate their winter flu risk and deploy vaccine stock accordingly. 

 Such information offers brands an unprecedented opportunity to deploy targeted advertising, whether that’s to reach customers, sell products, cultivate brand-customer relationships, or deliver a specific message. Footlocker can, for example, let customers know that a pair of sneakers they like is on sale nearby. More significantly, geospatial data can help brands better understand how customers move through the physical world on a daily basis and traverse their purchasing journeys. With the correct execution, they can convert this data into sales and increased brand awareness around retail locations. In the US, where retail space per capita is 15 to 20 times higher than in other developed markets, the decrease in brick-and-mortar footfall due to COVID-19 will likely be anxiety-inducing for brands, but the savvy use of big data and mapping tech can help optimize operations. 

Map apps have evolved far beyond mere route-planning

Understanding omnichannel purchasing journeys

To remain competitive in the contemporary retail climate, brands need to understand the interplay between consumers’ online and offline purchasing journeys. According to research carried out over the 2019 holiday season, 78% of people surveyed used more than three channels to shop over a two-day period before making a purchase and 88% of in-store purchases were preceded by an online search. 

 Given that customers may visit a store to try a product before going home to compare prices and purchase online, ‘four-wall’ metrics – footfall, revenue, etc. – therefore can’t capture a location’s full contribution to brand-building and sales outcomes. According to McKinsey, the most ‘advanced’ retailers in this regard now give retail locations credit for any part played in customer decision journeys, acknowledging the value physical outlets deliver as part of the omnichannel experience. 

Consumers now expect a store to fulfill a range of roles – from experiential showroom to online order collection point to hangout setting. A survey carried out in 2019 revealed that 73% of Americans were interested in stores that offered other useful services besides selling products, with 64% showing interest in retailers that provide additional information that’s entertaining or informative. 

 With demands growing for personalized services and experiences, GIS tech can play a role in elevating the in-store journey. Kimberly Yarnell, the vice president of digital media at Macy’s, notes that “location is not just about where a person is at a moment in time, it’s about where he or she has been and understanding where he or she may go.” 

Brands now have access to an unprecedented range of location-specific consumer info from sources including check-in programs and anonymized mobile phone data. As well as helping them market more effectively to customers, this data can build a more detailed picture of how people move through a market and interact with their brand. Vodafone and Verizon won accolades for an augmented reality treasure hunt in 2019 that used geolocation data and required users to check in via social media to receive clues leading to the physical location of the final prize, an iPhone 11. 

 “In the current climate, understanding consumer behavior spatially is helping retailers with their omnichannel strategy. GIS helps you understand more trends about your customer base – knowing who’s more likely to start wanting home delivery or click-and-collect rather than browsing in a traditional brick-and-mortar store,” explains Kean. 

A person’s location history opens up a host of brand opportunities

“Where we are seeing the most interesting advances in GIS is at the places it meets with progress being made in other areas of computing capacity – for example, cloud computing, AI, and machine learning,” explains Dr. Jennifer Swift, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Spatial Sciences Institute. “There are a range of products now available to help users take advantage of these advances through user-friendly dashboards, such as Esri’s ArcGIS Suite, the AWS and Azure cloud computing tools, and Google Colab.” 

 charted the historical journey web mapping has taken as GIS tech has intersected with and incorporated advances from other web technologies. It identifies how the advent of real-time access to a customer’s location allowed for businesses to begin location-based marketing, subsequently highlighting eight distinct eras as mapping capabilities have improved by merging with developments in, for example, web advertising, interactive interfaces, and crowd-sourced data. 

 For instance, Google Maps’ introduction of a feature to help people find 

 will make it easier to navigate cities on two wheels as people shift toward greener and more COVID-friendly commutes.

One of the most important advances that will reshape the way maps affect consumer behavior is the rise of cloud computing. Off-loading information processing from a device to the cloud allows for more complex calculations, involving a wider diversity of datasets, to be made. Biometric data is just one example of a dataset collected by sensors that is increasingly deployed throughout the built environment to pick up real-world variables that can inform customer experiences. “We are increasingly seeing sensors used throughout the built world, installed by a number of agencies to pick up on anything from gunshot incidents to street lights that might need repair,” says Dr. Swift. “Within commercial spaces, these sensors can add to a company’s understanding of consumers by allowing for the collection of specialized datasets on consumer movements and behaviors and contributing to a richer geolocation picture.” 

Privacy concerns may hinder omnichannel brand experiences

As people increasingly use their phones for on-the-go location-based searches, brands are tapping into the flood of geolocation data to connect in a range of powerful ways. The richest of these opportunities lies at the meeting point of GIS and other emerging technologies, and continue to be improved by computing advances that allow for more powerful and complex real-time information processing. The power of web mapping is best understood in the wider context of data – commonly understood to be ‘the new oil’ – both in terms of pre-existing sets for location information to be combined with, but also opportunities for brands to collect novel location-specific data on consumers and their behavior. When processed using the full capabilities of pre-existing datasets and processing power enabled by cloud computing, the extent to which brands will be able to understand consumer behavior grows further. 

The Internet of Location needs to be helpful

, the smart use of mapping and geo-location data can make for memorable creative work. But as 

highlighted, accessing people’s data comes with a huge trust caveat that can’t be ignored. In a 2020 Accenture survey, 38% of respondents ranked ‘concerns about my privacy or data security’ as the top barrier to the adoption of chatbots, computers, or digital devices for health questions and care. 

 Brands are likely to win favor and trust if they can position themselves as helpful – and the benefits of this can go beyond a budget burger. Google Maps tapped into this when it 

 in the Summer of 2020, giving users live updates on evacuation information. Meanwhile, 

 helps users combat bias in the news by allowing direct access to reporting on the ground.

“It used to be the case that CEOs would drive around three different sites and pick one. Now, they can be presented with the data about those sites and use it to inform that decision,” says Kean. 

 Yet while data-driven decision-making may work on a corporate level, when it comes to communicating decisions to consumers, the human element still packs a punch. Research from 

 has found that even when people are presented with the best scientific approach to navigate a game, they still go with gut instinct most of the time. People want to maintain a sense of agency even when being very specifically targeted. Google Maps acknowledged this in 2019 by pushing 

Dr. Jennifer N. Swift is an associate professor of spatial sciences at the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. Her research focuses on the intersection of web and mobile GIS with CyberGIS, the latter including instruction in advanced cyberinfrastructure.

Kristopher Kean is the head of real estate and retail at Esri UK, a leading global supplier of geographic information system software, web GIS, and geodatabase management applications.

North America

United States

Getting Around

Technology

The Guardian

Google Cloud

Interview with Kristopher Kean conducted by the author

Statista

Strava

Think with Google

Digiday

University of Southern California

McKinsey & Company

Google for Retail

Suzy

Campaign

Interview with Dr. Jennifer Swift conducted by the author

International Journal of Geo-Information

Accenture

As people increasingly rely on their phones to bridge the gap between digital and physical worlds, maps have emerged as an exciting space for creativity and personalization. So, how can brands best use geospatial data to connect with their customers and deliver optimized omnichannel experiences?

Whopper Detour: tech-aided trolling feeds burger wars

Could COVID-19 pave the way for a greener commute?

How has COVID-19 changed Americans' views on privacy?

Slow Streets: re-imagining mobility in Oakland