Location-Based Marketing – The Concept

copyrights:Aleksander Buczkowski 2011-2012

Location Based Marketing has been widely used by marketers for several years already but the topic has not been academically investigated. I’ve been doing some significant research in academic and non-academic literature and the only academic description was proposed by Shuguoli Li (in 2011) who proposed the concept that LBM can be described as convergence of three technologies: Location-Based Services, Mobile Marketing and Contextual Marketing.

Mobile Marketing Association defines mobile marketing as “a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network”. Mobile marketing is the most personal form of web marketing.

Contextual marketing as a form of targeted advertising that is using behavior or text content imputed by user to provide personalized marketing information with the Internet in real-time, so it’s something what you can observe in gmail, when ads are targeted to what you write. In Location-Based Services as a part of Context-Aware Services the context refers to spatio-temporal data or metadata.

But the is as well different approach and I think that the future marketing will be based to the following premises. Knowing where and when the customer is, it is possible to discover why is he there, so the context of this visit. For example if a customer is at the football stadium during the hour of the match it is highly possible that he is there to support one of teams. This creates whole new way to target specific audience with a context-related information.

Within this model Location Based Marketing could be defined as a mobile marketing utilizing positioning technologies to deliver targeted communication channel where one of the targeting variables (context) is user’s geographic location.