Over the summer, Steve Rowen and I worked on a project that entailed evaluating how retailers used localized messaging in communicating promotions to consumers. We looked across a broad continuum of communication channels – does the retailer at least leverage a closing shot in their TV advertising that lets people know the closest location? When retailers advertise online or via mobile, does the call to action include local stores?

The answer, we found, was generally “no.” Currently retailers are so wrapped up in exploring the “mass” possibilities of newer communication channels like in-game advertising or Facebook that they haven’t really thought through what new capabilities these channels offer and how they might take advantage of those capabilities. In other words, they’re so busy trying to make traditional online ads work on the mobile phone that they haven’t explored anything about the idea that they might actually be able to target those ads – and increase response rates – by including a more specific, and local, call to action.

Alongside this challenge, RSR has taken quite a few briefings lately on mobile apps that will theoretically deliver personalized offers based on your phone’s GPS coordinates. I downloaded one, which shall remain nameless, that would send me offers when I got close enough to a store that had offers to send. It took me about a week to realize that the app was “always on” from a GPS perspective – it was killing my battery. Not cool. Not to mention that these apps suffer from a Catch-22 problem: retailers don’t want to bother creating offers for these channels because not enough consumers use them, but consumers don’t use the apps because there aren’t a lot of compelling offers.

So despite the promise of geotargeting – micro-targeting based on GPS or the type of regional information that can be gleaned from a laptop browser hitting a local server – we’ve seen precious little of it so far, and most of what we’ve seen is a case of the capability far outstripping retailers’ desire to employ it to increase advertising or promotion effectiveness. It’s a shame – at a time when store-based retailers are fighting declining store comps due to online’s growth, anything that can drive consumers to stores, particularly when shoppers are in a context that implies proximity to act, like with mobile, then retailers should be looking at ways to take advantage of these kinds of localization capabilities.

Figuring out how local or targeted your call to action needs to be goes back to a fundamental evaluation that all retailers should be doing all the time: how do shoppers engage with you, and what is their typical path to purchase for each channel of engagement? When digital communication strategies are being driven exclusively by the eCommerce team, then the store and its role in the shopping process may not be well-understood – how long it did it take for store locaters to be added to retailers’ eCommerce sites? And in how many cases was that the eCommerce team’s idea vs. stores saying they wanted it? 

The same can be said for finer-grained communication channels – where the information that comes along with a specific display opportunity gives the retailer a chance to be much more targeted or relevant to the shopper, without necessarily having to know intimate details about who that consumer is. For example, a shopper inquiring about a retailer’s circular that is sitting less than a mile from a store location (possibly even in the parking lot) has a very different objective than one browsing online at home. Proximity makes the difference. 

But you can only take advantage of that proximity if you can get geotargeted to begin with.