While it might be tempting to just follow the gut instinct when it comes to planning a new retail store business, there’s a lot more that can be considered to guarantee success. From competitor analysis to catchment area data, leveraging everything at their disposal will help expansion managers make informed decisions and enable them to get under the skin of a neighbourhood to understand if it’s the right location or not. Here are the top tips for smarter retail expansion. 

When planning the next retail store business, it might be important to inject a local flavour. Creating exact duplicates of the original store is great for branding. But especially if it comes to international expansion, you might need to connect with local shoppers’ habits and cultures. It’s why McDonalds, for instance, caters its menu according to local tastes – fancy a slice of Malaysia’s Cookies & Cream Pie, or to chow down on Switzerland’s McRaclette Burger?  

The same logic might also explain why Starbucks, the biggest coffee chain in the world, failed to make an impact on the coffee-obsessed Australian market. Its blend was too sweet for cultured locals who were brought up on espresso from Italian and Greek immigrants and the company was forced to close 70% of its stores in 2018. Starbucks is slowly making a comeback in the country, aiming its wares at tourists, but it learnt the hard way that doing your research is key. 

It’s a fact of life that some locations do better than others, but when armed with the right insights, expansion managers can make a more informed choice from their desk, saving them the agony and expense of trial by error. If you’re a restaurant, for example, you’ll really want to drill into the foot traffic data: Is this area busy during the day and evening? Will there be lunch and dinner customers walking past? Are there good public transport options and car parking nearby?  

It is important to discover if a site is attractive by analysing how many potential customers can reach a location in a reasonable amount of time according to how they travel there.  Also the area’s key points of interest are essential and whether it, and they, are a good fit with the brand and product. The more data available, the better and sooner informed decisions can be made about whether the area is a good fit for the intended purpose.  

But finding the right data isn’t an easy feat either. Public data about the area may be unavailable, coming from untrusted sources, or fragmented by different sources (as an example, Germany has 16 official sources of public data). Although some businesses may need data scientists, you will want to choose a tool that can pull the data you need from trusted sources and integrate it with the data you already own. 

Once you’ve discovered everything there is to know about the area through location data, it’s equally important to get to know your potential customers. This means that you should learn more about the demographics of the area and see if this aligns with your target customer research. What did you learn about the audience of your existing shop that you can implement to improve the performance at the new location? Is your target audience likely to visit your new location? What competing businesses is your audience visiting in the area of your new shop? These, and more, are all the questions you need to answer before committing to a new location. 

But collecting data about the location and about your audience is not going to be enough to make an informed decision. You will have to clean, organise, prioritise, and analyse the data at hand. In other words, you will have to put the data to use. 

A tool such as the TargomoLOOP integrates numerous data variables such as demographics, purchasing power and foot traffic from trusted sources. Then sophisticated algorithms calculate what demand you can expect for a specific location and the entire branch network, and whether your stores may be cannibalise each other. You can even marry our location intelligence with your own business data to uncover correlations. You can try out different scenarios and instantly see which options are best for your next retail business. 

Interested to learn more about the analytics platform TarogmoLOOP? Request a demo and free trial. 

The digitalization of the Public Sector, in Europe and in Germany takes place in societies that are heavily urbanized. Urban areas are currently housing 72% of the EU-28’s population. Rural populations on the other hand showed a steady decline over the last 50 years; in 1960, 35% of Europeans lived in rural areas, compared to 28% in 2010. Germany is not an outlier of this trend.

While digital services can improve and soften the impact of urbanization, they can also exacerbate existing problems. Rapid advancements in technology and social change challenge the political realities on the ground and public officials need to show that they are able to create a smart and sustainable future for their citizens.

The challenges of digitalization also differ vastly between rural and urban areas, especially when it comes to mobility and the provision of public services. In recent years, cities have witnessed a profound change in mobility patterns. New forms of individual mobility services such as car-, ride- and bike-sharing shape our daily lives. These services lead to new spatial demands, like designated parking facilities and charging infrastructures. While traffic behaviour in German cities is increasingly multimodal, the private car remains the number one means of transport in rural areas: 72% of residents depend on their own car or two-wheeler. Furthermore, 70% of workers living outside urban centres travel by car to work, regardless of commuting times.

The mayor of Bad Nauheim, Klaus Kreß, presented his city’s approach towards digitalization at the Smart Country Convention. Bad Nauheim, is a great example how digitalization can help a city reinvent itself. Before the reunification of Germany, Bad Nauheim had the oldest population in the whole country. Since then, they decided to tackle this problem head-on with new digital tools while keeping in mind local traditions and concerns. According to the Mayor, there are clear goals for digitalization in the rural context: Problem solving, sustainability and efficiency, enhancing experience and creating an innovative identity. With this in mind, digitalization can be a major driver for sustainable, innovative urban development, but also for more identification and experience. Dr. Stephanie Arens from @suedwestfalen presented a different solution: Coming together as a region. [quote text=”Digital, sustainable and authentic: that’s the DNA of our digital strategy as a region.” type=”long” name=”Dr. Stephanie Arens” role=”Head of Regional Development at suedwestfalen”] Suedwestfalen is a development company founded to develop a concept for a digital future with 59 cities and communities of this West-German region. This innovative private-public venture bundles the strengths of business and politics to set up the region for growth and innovation.

Cities are using the benefits of sharing capacities to their advantage as well. The mayor of mid-sized German city Ulm (122.000 inhabitants) described how his city only tackles certain questions like mobility, energy, infrastructure together with surrounding cities. This way they managed to work on a coherent strategy and save costs.

Munich’s Chief Innovation Officer, Thomas Bönig, presented the city’s three strategic pillars for handling the digital revolution: Firstly, meet citizens where they are, don’t stop new developments that emerge from the bottom-up. Secondly, no city is an island, using interdependencies and cross-pollination between cities to be more efficient. Thirdly, it’s crucial to find the middle ground between individualized focus and standardized best practices.

All of these efforts are bundled under one umbrella agency, Munich Digital. Their vision: Make Munich by 2025 a future-oriented and sustainable metropolis that uses digitalization actively and responsibly – for the benefit of its citizens, making it possible for everyone to digitally experience Munich.

While these anecdotes were certainly enlightening, Bitkom Research went one step further to understand the whole picture of Germany-wide digitalization. They collected, checked and qualified a total of 7,800 data points. All 81 German cities with at least 100,000 inhabitants were evaluated in five areas: Administration, IT and telecommunications infrastructure, energy and the environment, mobility, and society. Learn More

While many of the examples mentioned in this article and the Smart City Index, are shining examples of a smart future, it is also clear that the road ahead is difficult and mistakes will be made.

One example for the difficulties of digital solutions are E-Scooters. We already touched upon this phenomenon in this recent blog post. Right now, the research suggests that e-scooters are nothing more than another mobility gadget for urbanites: They dominate in city centers but are mostly vacant in outer-city areas where they could solve the problem of the first mile: Getting people to the next public transport station, and thereby eliminating the need for expensive infrastructure expansions to all corners of urban settlements.

With Location Intelligence, city planners can better arrange parking zones and routes and make a tangible impact on public transport efficiency.

The electrification of public transport networks in Europe will be an iterative process that changes with the needs, quantity and preferences of its citizens. Such networks will need to be flexible and open to new electrified vehicles for urban transportation. Targomo’s data-driven approach can help public sector officials optimize the planning phase of electrified public infrastructure projects, analyse the results after implementation, and effectively plan for future projects.

We are already helping our innovative customers such as Ruter#, Oslo’s public transport authority, to optimize their public transport network and deliver better services to their citizens.

The first the e-scooter regulation did not come into force in Germany until mid-June this year, after a long political debate. In a country in which climate change is widely perceived as being one of the most pressing topics, hopes remain high that e-scooters will come in handy as a long-needed green revolution of urban mobility. Being considered a viable alternative to city car traffic, their widespread use promises reduced traffic congestion and lower emissions.

E-scooters offer an independent, flexible, and convenient way of traveling through the city for both tourists and locals, especially for short and medium distances. Accordingly, their number has been increasing drastically over the course of the last three weeks. A recent survey suggests that every fourth German could imagine buying an e-scooter in the future.

Internationally, these environmentally-friendly vehicles jumped onto the scene approximately 18 months ago and are now a common sight from Canada to New Zealand. However, the rules for e-scooters vary widely across the globe. Germany tightly restricts them to bike lanes as well as roads with their speed limited to 20km/h (or 12.4 mp/h). Security concerns further require all vehicles to be officially authorized and their owners must have liability insurance.

Evidently, this new emerging market presents a huge opportunity for both vendors and sharing companies. In the case of Berlin alone, eight sharing services announced their interest to enter the playing field. Among the main competitors currently are Lime, Circ, Tier, and Voi. Their fleet is “free floating”, which means that the vehicles do not require docking and can be left anywhere within their area of service.

Due to their size, weight, and affordability, e-scooters run on comparatively small batteries which have to be charged using a normal socket. While the sharing companies hire “juicers” to recharge the individual vehicles, chances are low the one closest to you will be at 100%. Even with your own e-scooter, the specific range is rarely self-evident. Will you make it to your workplace? Your favorite restaurant? The lake?

To answer these questions in the most intuitive and fast way, we tweaked our travel time API: The map of Germany below allows you to determine the areas you can reach with your e-scooter based on your current location and the remaining power in watt-hours (Wh). You can enter your location manually or automatically share it.

This application calculates the travel distance between your starting position and all surrounding coordinates along bike lanes and streets. It takes into account differences in altitudes, as they strongly influence energy consumption. The model could be further enriched by making it possible to add individual body/baggage weight to the equation. Our API would also allow the integration of POIs such as restaurants and city sights or display the most energy-efficient routes to the destination of your choice. If that would be useful to you, just drop us a line. Have a safe journey!