Location is Everything
One of the insights that have kept me going as a community development worker is “it’s where your feet are!” Many claim it is our heart or mind that forms our role in the world. There is a degree of truth in this because it is certainly true that our values are important. But what forms our values? Perhaps our geographical location, where our feet are? Certainly the relationship between place and values is complex. It cannot be ignored, location is everything.
There is interplay between our online and offline practice in a parallel complex fashion. David R Bell in his book “Location is (Still) Everything: the Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One“ makes a valiant start at unpicking this relationship.
His interest is primarily in lessons for online marketers and so his emphasis is on the behaviour of customers in aggregate and not so much the behaviour of communities and economies. His perspective is that of a business owner who is seeking a market on a nationwide scale and then on the impact these decisions might have on a community, where many such decisions affect the lives of residents, without their knowledge or consent.
The book is full of helpful insights and we should be grateful for that. The question, as always is how we use the insights gleaned from such research. This work opens up a lot of questions and finding answers to some of them is one of the purposes of this blog.
Marketing GRAVITY
Bell uses an acrostic, GRAVITY, to organise his message across seven chapters.
- Geography is the foundational idea, that where we live to some degree determines our relationship with the online world. Your online interests may be determined by the goods and services available locally. Obviously if something is not available it is possible to find it online. But perhaps less obvious is the way we can explore local possibilities online and then travel to make a purchase.
- Resistance is where our economic activities encounter barriers, of which there appear to be two main ones. Distance is one. However attractive an offer may be, there is a limit to the distance customers will travel to take advantage of it. The second is ease of searching for a solution to a problem.
- Adjacency is about how sales tend to cluster in geographical areas because of the spread of the news of a product or service by word of mouth or example.
- Vicinity is where people with similar lifestyles and values live in very different places and how information passed between them.
- Isolation looks at behaviours in areas with varying degrees of provision of a particular commodity. Where demand is high, local shops will tend to stock more options than in places where demand is low. So, are people who live in low demand areas, more likely to purchase online?
- Topography explores some of the complexities of relationships between what is available online and locally. It doesn’t follow that online information leads inevitably to online sales. It is possible to find out what is available locally online. This is all further complicated by the growth of mobile devices.
- You explores some of the implications of GRAVITY for developing businesses.
All of these are worth further consideration about their implications for local markets.
One final word of high praise for David R Bell. It is always invigorating to find a writer who knows how to use the word “nice” nicely.