“Focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.”- Jim Collins
Geography exerts a perennial effect on the very nature of enterprise, and plays a persistent role in the ebbs and flows that define the matrix of trade and commerce. This assertion holds true since times immemorial when enterprising sailors, seafarers, and itinerant tradesmen established land-based routes and undertook perilous sea-borne voyages on sail-powered vessels. The common objective was to discover new markets, expand the remit of an enterprise beyond local populations, and generate profits for early versions of barter-based enterprise.
In modern times, geography continues to influence the development of commercial ideas and strategies. In fact, a winning geo strategy can assist modern business enterprises to analyze and develop a territory definition of a certain market and gain deeper understanding of customer segments (and consumer trends) that typify such markets. Such a strategy must include analytics components that translate customer data into an expansive market analysis. These actions and undertakings typically empower business operators to develop, for instance, targeted marketing plans that generate high returns for invested resources. The large expanse of a modern flowchart can assist in the creation of a winning geo strategy; such illustrations offer significant scope for designing business plans that may distinguish an entrepreneur’s journey when viewed from multiple perspectives.
Market growth remains a pertinent factor that governs the development and direction undertaken by modern commercial organizations. The strategy to drive market growth may find business motivation that resides in the creation of (for instance) networks of franchises. Subsequently, a winning geo strategy may emerge that seeks to analyze business performance in certain locations, the nature of the surrounding demographics in said locations, potential for civic expansion based on local government policies, scope for infrastructure development as defined in federal rules and regulations, an analysis of trends in future population growth, available market opportunities for large brands, etc. These elements, when plotted inside a flowchart diagram, can provide the sinews of a winning geo strategy that projects market growth through franchise-based development. The stewards of the sponsor business could expand the potential latent in each of these elements as part of efforts to chart a viable market growth strategy. The flowchart enables visual analysis and development of such a strategy, thereby gaining the confidence of business analysts and brand strategists.
Location-based marketing gains a central role in the formulation of a winning geo strategy. Such an assertion manifests in the premium that modern businesses place in marketing (products and services) to populations based on their location. Stores of a retail-based business enterprise, for instance, can deploy digital technology in the form of beacons that transmit targeted commercial messages to customers and visitors entering a brick-and-mortar outlet. Such a strategy can operate in layers wherein, the business offers custom coupons and other incentives to store visitors, delivers special offers to customers on specific days of the week, generates higher levels of transactions on weekends through promotions, etc. Additional variations to such a winning geo strategy could include advertisements and digital coupons offered to residents of a particular ZIP code through the agency of social media platforms. These variations, when designed inside a flowchart illustration, can complement strategy and enable sponsors to sharpen their competitive edge in congested markets.
Mapping population densities and generating an assessment of the buying power of citizens can prove crucial to defining the contours of a winning geo strategy. Pursuant to this, businesses can invest in designing flowcharts that spotlight above metrics over a wide swathe of targeted geography. Such an illustration may depart from design conventions, and emerge in the form of dense numbers superimposed on a detailed outline of a region (or large urban location). The contents could include numerical information that indicates ZIP code, strength of local population, locations that house high net worth individuals, an estimation of the annual buying power of various population clusters, weather patterns, etc. Such information, when processed with digital analytics, allows stewards to optimize the planned location of new business outlets; this initiative can also help generate projections of annual/quarterly sales registered by such outlets. The downstream effects of a winning geo strategy can include the nebulous cores of future business planning and other inputs that can empower a business to thrive in different regions over a long-term perspective.
Inferences and intelligently-framed observations represent crucial inputs to flesh out the contours of a winning geo strategy. This finds reinforcement in the views of market observers that concur, “Geographic location is the key factor in being able to extrapolate known information onto persons, households, or areas that (up to that point) had little or no information.” In line with this, entrepreneurs and business organizations can design flowcharts with additional panels that house inferences devised by planners, strategists, and brand developers. These panels can complement bodies of information and data sourced from surveys, electronic data gathering activities, and information sourced from statistics endorsed by government or federal organizations. Such a strategy also empowers business organizations to utilize geospatial technologies in the pursuit of overarching objectives, such as brand positioning and expanding commercial footprints. That said; businesses must strive to embellish a winning geo strategy with constant inputs in terms of sampling and supplying historical data, and modeling various outcomes and scenarios.
Business organizations can register immense potential gains when they incorporate geospatial information into the framework of a winning geo strategy. This finds resonance in the views of market observers that note, “Geospatial data and geospatial intelligence are important game changers, because they provide a robust starting point to relate consumer activity to a physical location with immediate implications.” For instance, a marketing strategist could deploy such techniques to construct a data-rich campaign that targets socio-cultural groups with curated advertisements on social media platforms. Geospatial data and intelligence can assist such an initiative and result in a calibrated delivery of brand messages, thereby spurring sales of the sponsor’s products and services. When applied to multiple geographies, such a campaign can deliver outsize gains for the sponsor, thereby validating the efficacy of a bespoke winning geo strategy. Flowcharts can help to map the moving parts and different components of such a campaign, thus enabling marketing professionals to deliver the proverbial goods to sponsor organizations.
These explorations spotlight some of the benefits of devising competent geo strategies on the part of modern businesses. In addition to the above, such strategies must find support in ongoing investments in technology, the creation of dedicated support groups, investments of time in delineating a range of strategies, and a persistent investigation into the core principles that animate the modern consumer. Each brand can develop intelligent strategies that support its own, unique requirements in modern market landscapes. However, the modern entrepreneur (and established brands) must calibrate efforts in view of regulatory diktats, the enduring icon of consumer rights, and privacy regulations that govern modern markets. The flowchart can assist in such efforts by developing scope for exploration and creating detailed assessments of the potential outcomes that flow from each strategy. Further, different versions of such illustrations can illuminate various aspects that attend commercial imperatives, while providing feedback generated from legacy business models. In doing so, the flowchart emerges as an interesting platform that helps design and implement intelligent geo strategies in the service of modern enterprise.
