The Missing Piece In Your Competitive Strategy–and Its Impact On The Bottom Line

Forbes

06-06-2025

Mapping and spatial analytics helps businesses make sure they're applying 'where' to basically every ... More question and analysis.
A MAJOR BREWERY had a new idea for how to find new customers, create new buzz, and build new loyalty.
They had big-time marketing. They had distribution into stores large and small. They had strong relationships with customers, eateries and bars.
What they wanted to do was create their own branded pubs.
They wanted to do it without bluster but with confidence.
What they needed was decisive insight. Intelligence — about their own business.
So, they mapped the popularity of craft beers by neighborhood. They studied nighttime traffic patterns, by the hour. They added information on the density and appeal of other restaurants and bars.
They looked at dining-out behavior and spending. Where was it rising, where declining by category?
Then they looked at areas that were expanding—teasing out places where income might increase, where demographics are shifting, by neighborhood, that matched the target groups for a hip new brewery.
They created their own business intelligence portfolio around the brewery idea—and it was built on a single quality: Location. Business intelligence that melds internal customer and operational data with external data of every sort.
Where would people be most interested in these new brew pubs?
Where do the demographics, the values, the behaviors and preferences, match the new community the brewer is hoping to tap?
The brewery team was illustrating the power of something all businesspeople struggle with: Where? And especially, Where next?
'Where?'—it's really the question of the moment, whether you're in construction or energy, consumer goods or retail, restaurants or banking.
'Where' questions are incredibly potent—they unlock growth, efficiencies and innovation. Oddly, though, location is the one thing most often missing from the strategic planning. From the analysis. From the business intelligence. From the operations.
It's an expensive miss.
Leaving out location means a lot of routine gaps—you're missing chances for efficiency in your operations and supply chain. You're missing chances to reduce risk, to improve the effectiveness of your marketing, to increase your adaptability in an uncertain business environment.
But what you're really missing is what that brewer is searching for: You're missing the chance to grow your existing customers in unexpected ways, and to find new customers and markets.
You're missing opportunity.
Location isn't about where you are, it's about where you're going.
THAT MAY SEEM LIKE a line you'd find on a motivational poster. But here's what makes it fresh:
There are tools to bring location intelligence right into your existing business intelligence platforms, exponentially enriching their analytical power.
We're not talking about Google Maps. That's simply how to get from A to B.
We're talking about being able to make the invisible visible—patterns, perils, possibilities.
We're talking about being able to map the future. And then take your business into it. And then seeing it thrive.
This approach has a name, of course: It's called mapping and spatial analytics. It's making sure you're applying 'where' to basically every question and analysis your company undertakes. It's weaving spatial intelligence into all the other kinds of intelligence analysis you already do.
Once you start using it, 'where' becomes not just intuitive, it becomes instantly compelling. You start asking, in every setting, how does location fit into this? What about 'the where'?
Two things are key: 'Spatial analytics' are easy to use—the complexity is under the hood. And as you'll quickly see, it provides a striking competitive advantage. Even if your business is humming along just fine, 'spatial analytics' provides a leap, in performance, in growth.
Here's how that looks in four big arenas:
Retail: The third largest fast-food chain in the U.S. by sales is a premier example of infusing mapping and spatial analytics into every element of how to run a business. Leaders and front-line managers at the restaurant chain use location data for everything from site selection and drive-through optimization to supply chain risk management and competitive intelligence. Since 2016, when location intelligence became part of their enterprise-wide business intelligence system, the chain has leveraged the 'location factor' to understand customer preferences and make confident business decisions. The results: average annual sales of $9.3 million per restaurant–the highest in the industry. Location data serves as what the chain calls an 'accelerant'—not just better decisions, but better decisions made faster. That comes in handy in all kinds of ways, including, for instance, helping re-make supply chains in real time during weather events and natural disasters.
Consumer goods: One of the world's largest apparel companies uses mapping and analytics to trace its supply chain across 40 countries—from raw materials with farmers and fabric makers to finished products–compressing six-month reporting tasks into days or weeks. The system isn't a one-time project: It's a permanent feature of operations, and updates in real time with new suppliers, new products, new global conditions. What began as a tool to understand labor and climate conditions in real-time has evolved into a comprehensive system that maps climate impact, anticipates disruptions from weather and logistics, and future-proofs the business by uncovering previously invisible risks. The technology enables global risk scanning that has already surfaced raw material problems in advance. It also helps meet growing government data reporting requirements, transforming the supply chain into a strategic value chain.
Logistics and transportation: One of America's largest transportation services companies, with a fleet of 440,000 leased and rented vehicles, uses mapping and spatial analytics to constantly assess where its customers are, where its trucks are, and where its service depots are, and to make sure vehicles and depots are positioned for maximum effectiveness; it uses location to help its customers understand issues of security; and to help its salespeople spot new areas of customer demand.
Banking: A major bank serving the Southeast and Midwest U.S. uses mapping and analytics to figure out where it should grow—what communities are growing? Where should it add branches? Where should it expand mortgage lending? Its small business lending? And like many other companies, the bank has discovered that once they start using it, the 'location factor' is valuable in unexpected ways, that quickly become indispensable. The bank uses mapping and analytics not just to look for new opportunities, but to assess the risk to its existing portfolio of loans, mortgages, and retail business by looking at how the communities where it already does business are changing, demographically, economically, and in terms of risks, especially from evolving climate and environmental risks. Finance is a portfolio business, and location intelligence lets the bank get the portfolio right to start, and then future proof it, keeping up in a very dynamic global economy.
Emergency Management: One of the largest employers in the U.S. uses location intelligence from mapping and analytics to prepare for natural disasters in advance, to anticipate what customers will need, and to coordinate real-time response directly with first responders. The mapping and analytics system is built right into the company's emergency operations center.
NOT ALL LOCATIONS are equal.
In business we know this intuitively—not all outlets do the same volume, not all neighborhoods have the same growth prospects, not all communities face the same kinds of extreme weather risk or, less discussed, climate opportunity.
We know this, but across many of our companies, we don't act like we know it.
Location is not some niche quality anymore. It's the opposite—it's a kind of master key that unlocks all the other elements of business intelligence in ways that are revealing, creative, energizing. It's that thing that makes the invisible visible.
Those who start to use mapping and analytics find not just that it's useful, it quickly becomes a feature that needs to be 'always on.' A director of analytics says now that spatial data is available across his company, 'I can't even tell you any business unit that we are not touching.'
Location is one of those tools with its own power and magnetism. Once you start using it, you quickly see all kinds of fresh ways to use it.
A senior executive at one of the world's largest banks, who got deeper and deeper into the wide-ranging applicability of mapping and analytics, recently told his staff, 'I'm not making a decision on anything until I see it on the maps. Not just the location, but all the implications of the location.'
Learn more about how businesses can achieve a competitive advantage with a location strategy.