This chapter briefly discusses the growing promotional techniques and marketing strategies adopted by organisations in attracting and retaining customers. The growth of technology has enabled new insights in pulling target customers and creating intentions to purchase products and services, and one of such methods is location-based mobile targeting technique. This strategy works best for those segments of users who look for instant information and are ready to take action based on the information/offers received. Through this chapter, the readers get a brief knowledge on technologies adopted by organisations in marketing and promotions, optimising the advertisements and offers to specific target population, what location-based marketing is, how it works, and technologies and techniques employed such as geofencing, geo conquesting, geotargeting, proximity marketing, etc. Further, the chapter discusses the advantages and disadvantages of mobile target marketing, and finally, the chapter ends by explaining how organisations could adapt for better competitive performance.
Top1. Introduction
Marketing has been a term used widely for any kind of process or activity performed by the organisation to reach customers. It starts from handling the suppliers till managing the relationship even after sales for the motive to retain them to resell, cross sell, upsell and branding activities. Over a period of time the Marketing domain has been widely researched and many subdomains have evolved and captured its own importance and attention among researchers. There have been many new concepts, theories, approaches, different schools of thoughts, and practices that keep evolving to satisfy the changing wants and requirements of the customer (Bruner, and Kumar, 2007). One of the most important elements of 4 Ps of marketing or marketing mix is ‘Place’, in other words ‘Location’. For marketers location of their customers plays a key role in proving their effectiveness across customer lifecycles which starts from discovering new customers and leading them to make purchase decisions; from keeping them engaged with their products to retaining them (Merisavo et al., 2006; Dennis et al., 2010).
According to He, et al., (2016) marketers, researchers and organisations are constantly looking for new strategies to target customers based on their physical or virtual location. Location based mobile customer targeting is one such strategy which provides the ability to share personalised content or ads to the customer at a moment when s/he can use it in real time and engage in instant sale. This strategy works best for those segments of users who look for instant information and are ready to take action based on the information/ offers received. From the study of Lin et al., (2022) It is to be noted that choosing appropriate information, attractive components, emotions, language, functional aspects would increase the attachment towards the target segment. Further if the customer is able to effortlessly filter the availability, cost, location directions, visual appearance that could fit their preferences in location and contexts would enhance the adoption of this technology (Tsang et al., 2004).
Organisations are witnessing an increasing number of such customers globally as customers are using smart mobile devices like phones, tablets, laptops etc at all times. Organisations and customers collectively believe that value for any product/services could be improved by not only increasing the functional and emotional benefits but also decreasing certain costs like time and effort of the customer (Grewal et al., 2011). Location based mobile targeting incrementally benefits the organisation in specifically focusing on selected segments with similar interest living in the area nearer to the offering of service (Shankar and Balasubramanian, (2009). This aspect comforts not only the established/reputed global brands but also the national and local brands where their appearance and area are limited and could rework on promotional and distribution expenditures. The usage of mobile devices has grown multifold in recent years. Today, these smart devices are used for multiple online activities by customers such as online shopping, e-banking, food ordering, booking tickets, hotel bookings, managing crypto currencies, gaming, music apps, social media, booking cabs, checking weather, tracking real time traffic and much more Du and Tang, (2014). In this context Location is the key component for mobile based targeting of customers. We can thus see an increasing number of marketers adopting mobile based location strategies to engage their users.