It is no secret the brick-and-mortar store is under assault and digital commerce is taking over the retail industry. Not surprisingly, the trend toward digital has inevitably has led to store closings, and a set of new strategies to take advantage of the changing role of the retail store. One good example is Urban Outfitters investing in key stores creating a casual dining experience to improve the overall shopping experience. The brick-and-mortar store still has its place, but in some areas of retail: brick-and-mortar expansion is a much bigger focus.
So Where is Brick-And-Mortar Expansion Happening?
Quite a few large retail chains like Starbucks, Wendy’s, Family Dollar, and Costco opened stores in 2016. Starbucks opened as many as 1,500 stores globally in 2016. You will notice new brick-and-mortar expansion is very big in quick service restaurants, and discount chains. Likewise, retailing is a broad term because bank branches, healthcare clinics, insurance offices, service providers, and all types of retailers are looking for the best retail location to build a store.
So how can a retailer find the optimal location to open a store?
The answer for retail site selection is in the data, but a little bit more is needed to answer the question. An analytics platform is also required and it must be able to do the following:
- Business User Friendly – Typically site selection is accomplished by the market development or a real estate team. Real Estate Professionals focus on real estate rather than learning technology. The analytics platform of choice must be sophisticated enough to help the real estate team with sales projections, stack ranking potential sites within a trade area, and market cannibalization.
- Tap into & Manage Disparate Data – Real Estate data resides inside the company firewall and outside the company firewall. This will never change for real estate site selection and the analytics platform of choice will require both ingesting data from dozens of data sources, and preparing that data as it flows into the platform.
- Dynamic Geo-Location Capabilities – The real estate market changes quickly, and the real estate department needs live interactive mapping capabilities. You do not want to get caught making site selection recommendations using static and latent data in markets and trade areas that change very quickly.
- Data Storytelling – The result of the retail site selection process is a stack ranked set of potential locations for a trade area that includes sales projections by site. This information is presented to a real estate steering committee. The ability to quickly (days not weeks) to pull a story together around the findings of the team and present that story back to the steering committee with recommendations is a must have.
The good news is that the newly announced Qlik acquisition of Idevio (rebranded as Qlik GeoAnalytics) provides all four of these capabilities and more! Even better is a Retail Site Selection solution has been assembled to showcase how a retailer can take advantage of data to make better retail site selection decisions in less time and resource investment. I invite you to take it for a test drive!
