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“Copycat” Location Analytics — Building Demographic Profiles with Few or No Locations
What is it and how can it benefit a growing company?
Views expressed are my own based on publicly available data and tools.
The cold start problem is a well known phenomena in recommendation engines. How do you develop a recommendation for someone when you don’t know anything about them?
Likewise, with location analytics, a business can face the same problem. You might think you know your target demographic, but if you only have one or two locations, there isn’t sufficient data to credibly verify this. So, what do you do?
One approach is to employ a “copycat location analytics” method. If you don’t know the specific profile of your customers, but you do know other places that they go, you can use that information to your advantage. Or, you can pick a brand (or competitor) where you think there’s strong overlap with your target customer base and reverse-engineer their location profile. You can use knowledge from other brands serving your target customer to help get you off the ground and learn where to start the new market search process.
How It Works
The process is fairly straightforward to carry out a “copycat” analysis:
