Today we are excited to announce the addition of Spatial.ai’s PersonaLive™ psychographic segmentation data set as part of the Unacast Insights platform. Retailers, real estate investors, and financial services industries have long come to Unacast for best-in-class visitation and migrations insights, but they have longed to get an even deeper understanding of the individuals who visit locations.
PersonaLive™ is the industry leader in market segmentation. With this data set users can understand their visitors based on 80 behavioral segments. To build this data set, Spatial.ai combines observations across millions of public social accounts, mobile devices, and household demographic records. This allows brands to get a deeper understanding not only of the demographics of their visitors, but to gain a deeper understanding of the motivations of their visitors.
“We’re excited to see the value that PersonaLive™ will bring to Unacast’s location intelligence platform,” said Lyden Frost, CEO at Spatial.ai. “This collaboration will revolutionize the way businesses use location insights to drive their decision making. We look forward to working closely with Unacast to deliver joint value across the retail, real estate, and financial services industries.”
Beginning today all customers of the Unacast Insights platform will have PersonaLive™ data included in their subscriptions. As Unacast continues to innovate and expand its Insights offerings our goal is to deliver that additional value as part of the ongoing investment our customers make in our platform.
“Unacast Insights continues to evolve to solve unmet needs across the location data industry. Customers and prospects alike are asking for easy-to-use tools built on sustainable, best-in-class data sets. We’re thrilled to partner with Spatial.ai to help businesses extract even more value from Unacast Insights through getting an even richer understanding of how people engage with brick and mortar locations,” said Thomas Walle, CEO and co-founder of Unacast.
Continuing the site selection example
Just a few days ago we shared our Comprehensive Guide To Site Selection. We’d like to continue that use case, showing how the use of Spatial.ai’s data can bring incredible insight to a current case of needing to re-lease a lot of locations.
In late April 2023, Bed Bath & Beyond filed for bankruptcy. That created both a challenge and an opportunity for the owners of the nearly 360 locations that are now vacant. Even Marketplace ran a story on what will become of these locations. This opens questions around how the commercial realtors and the potential tenants (likely retailers) will evaluate the space.
To demonstrate how some of Unacast’s most successful customers handle situations like this, and what additional value Unacast Insights customers can get by using PersonaLive™, we’ll look at a Bed Bath & Beyond location in Noblesville, a suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana, in the zip code 46060. This is a store where closure was announced in February 2023, in the earliest rounds of store closings, so it gives us a good look at how we can understand the nature of the real estate assets involved in the Bed Bath & Beyond bankruptcy.
To begin, what we’re really trying to understand is what’s happening with the population around this location. What we can see, at a glance, is that the population in this zip code is, indeed, shrinking. However it’s bordered by nearby zip codes that are actually growing.
If we look a little bit closer at how things are changing in Noblesville, Indiana, if we look over even a few years we can see that the relative income and age have stayed nearly the same over time.
If the age of the population of this zip code is staying the same, and the income is staying the same, this should raise the questions of, “What does the population look like that was coming to this Bed Bath & Beyond over the last year or so? Does it match the 30-something population of this zip code or does it look a bit different? Is there something more I can understand about this population so that if I’m in the business of leasing this space, I can better target my tenants? Or alternatively if I’m a brand/operator of a space, is there something I can learn so that I can see if the people who previously went to this location match who I want to target?”
When we begin to dig into these questions, things start to get pretty interesting. It turns out that the visitors to this location didn’t only come from the Noblesville, Indiana zip code, but they actually came from all over the suburbs of Indianapolis. Some of those suburbs were growing; some were shrinking.
Now we find out something really interesting about these visitors. If we use Spatial.ai’s PersonaLive™ data to get a richer understanding, we find out that while the median income of these visitors is in the mid- $60,000 range, the actual visitors to this location were somewhat more affluent. Thus, between the product mix inside the store, the marketing efforts of the operator, and the location itself, there is an opportunity to pull from a slightly different demographic.
We also see that the visitors are somewhat older than the population of the zip code as well as mostly being home owners (which probably makes sense for a home goods store). This should open up a number of possibilities for potential tenants of the space, such as, “Should I put more of a focus on premium products in the store? Should I focus on homewares? If people are willing to drive to come to this location, what can I offer them that’s differentiated as an experience, to make that drive feel worthwhile?” And this should also offer up questions for a lessor to ask, “What kinds of retailers am I working with whose target population matches a slightly more affluent demographic? For a retailer who is a perfect fit for this location, how can I shape incentives to get them in the space prior to the Black Friday season of shopping?” and so on.
To see a demo of Unacast Insights, now with PersonaLive™, book a meeting now.
