The COVID-19 lockdown has put a lot of strain on different aspects of the retail business, especially supply chain, logistics, online commerce, click and collect, etc. During this time, many Location Intelligence analysts got diverted from their usual jobs of addressing big strategic questions to supporting Covid response efforts such as routing and forecasting of Web delivery and other operational challenges. Now, as retailers settle down, the question staring them in the face is: what happens next in retail? The pandemic has brought a lot of change to the market, particularly in Europe and North America, but there has also been a lot of innovation.
Using location for best results
Retail is one of the major property use classes in the world. This includes shops, restaurants, banks, etc. However, in today’s circumstances, a lot of them are not required for traditional uses anymore. I think this will lead to a wave of a new type of use classes that we haven’t even thought of. After every crisis there is a burst of innovation. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, supermarkets were born, and after a string of economic crises in the 70s and 80s, retail and shopping centers came up. During the pandemic, retailers started to experience an upsurge in online shopping. This led to the opening of fulfilment centers, dark kitchens, and small distribution hubs specifically focused on deliveries. Moving forward, location companies can help in choosing the best locations for these new use classes, which require a large pool of labor and good connectivity to motorways and railway networks.
“Mobility data from different cities in the world helps in gaining insights into market conditions, which can lead to further innovation.”
Maturing datasets
The datasets that are coming out now are more mature. The reason for this maturity is the development and evolution in the last one year. We have done a lot of work on alternative mobile datasets around the world. Retailers are now looking for predictive data concerning people’s shopping behavior, obtained through financial and traditional data sources. Geolytix is interested in genuine innovations with traditional approaches. The company has spent a lot of time on mobility data from a variety of sources and combined it with other datasets to gain intelligence. Many of our customers are big global retail companies. Mobility data from different cities in the world helps them gain insights into market conditions globally, which can lead to further innovation.
Impending boom
We also do traditional retail modeling, including spatial interaction models or geographic regression. We are particularly interested in the next census. The UN has mandated that all countries in the world conduct their census between 2020 and 2022. Census data is significant, as it familiarizes every business with the definite reality of the total population size and the geographies of this population. All other data, such as electoral registers, mobile phone data, banking data, utility data, smart city data, or sensor data do not present the definite truths of people’s location. So, when the census data comes out in every decade, there is another burst of application.
