Location-Based Marketing

3The Spatial Marketing Mix

This chapter considers three of the elements of the marketing mix, namely the product, the price and the promotion. This is the famous 4P rule (McCarthy 1960), which has since been somewhat challenged (Van Watershoot and Van der Bulte 1992). Place will be dealt with in Chapter 4, which is mainly dedicated to store location. But before going into the details of the marketing mix, it is first necessary to define the spatial marketing mix, and to do so, to penetrate the field of strategic marketing.

3.1. Spatial marketing and the marketing mix

Ubiquity, already mentioned, becomes the characteristic behavior of consumers who master the use of mobile technologies.

This new behavior requires a more fluid marketing mix (Cox 2004) that needs to be rethought in order to adapt it, on the one hand, to spatial marketing, and on the other hand, and above all, to mobile marketing (see Chapter 5).

3.1.1. Strategic marketing and space

Every company faces competition. Knowing where competitors are located, not only in terms of their production and distribution locations, but also in terms of their influence on local markets, is therefore of major interest. However, attacking a competitor head-on often leads to failure. The retail markets provide many examples. Worse still, invading a market a priori without local competitors can sometimes turn violent: Walmart (Hunt et al. 2018) and Carrefour (Temman 2006) had a bitter experience of this in South Korea, a country ...