Why Understanding Your Customers is as Important as Understanding Locations

Key Insights

• Footfall data shows how busy a location is, but footfall data analysis becomes more useful when it is combined with customer insight to show whether those visitors are commercially relevant.
• Geodemographic classifications turn customer postcodes into rich audience profiles, giving brands a better way to understand who uses each site and where to find more people like them.
• For organisations asking how to understand your customers, location planning should look beyond catchment size and focus on customer behaviour, spending habits and local audience fit.
• Understanding customer needs and expectations can change more than site selection. It can shape the right format, product mix, marketing approach and growth opportunity for each location.
  
  

A team is reviewing potential locations - on paper, they all look strong…

…Each sits within a solid catchment, each shows a healthy population within a reasonable drive time, and each appears to offer real opportunity based on maps and coverage alone. 

This is usually where location planning begins - with boundaries, distances, and counts. Where are our sites? Where are our competitors? How many people live within a 20-minute drive? 

Those are sensible questions, and they help define the opportunity - but they only tell you half the story. 

The other half is about people. Not just how many of them are in a given area, but who they are, how they behave, and whether they're actually the kind of customer your brand needs to attract. 

This article looks at why customer understanding matters as much as location understanding, including how to understand customer behaviour, needs and expectations, and how geodemographic data and footfall data help bridge that gap when organisations are making site and network decisions.

Why location data alone is not enough

A site can look strong on paper, good visibility, solid traffic, decent footfall, and still underperform. The reason is usually simple: the people passing through aren't the right fit for the brand. 

Footfall data tells you how many people visit an area, when they arrive, how long they stay, and where they've come from. That's genuinely useful, but it doesn't tell you whether those visitors are your likely customers. 

High footfall isn’t the same as commercial relevance.

Catchment and drive-time analysis adds another layer - it shows how many people are within reach of a location. But again, reach isn't the same as fit. A large catchment full of the wrong customer types will still underdeliver, no matter how well the site scores on everything else.

The gap that tends to cause problems is the one between "this area is busy" and "this area has enough of our customers." Filling that gap is where customer data and geodemographics come in.

What customer data actually adds to location planning

Geodemographics is a way of understanding people based on where they live. A geodemographic classification combines demographic information, socioeconomic data and lifestyle indicators to build clear profiles that reflect how people actually behave - not just how old they are or what they earn.

For organisations asking how to understand your customers beyond a list of postcodes, geodemographic data turns customer postcodes into a clearer picture of who is using each location.

Those postcodes are mapped to established consumer segments, such as those created through tools like CAMEO, giving brands a clearer picture of who their customers are, what their spending habits look like, and which areas are likely to contain more people like them.

This takes you from “where do our customers live?” to “who are they and where can we find more of them?” and that’s what geodemographics makes possible. It’s the difference between knowing that a location has 50,000 people within a 20-minute drive and knowing how many of those people match your target customer profile.

For site selection and network planning, this matters. A location that looks marginal based on population alone can look very different once you understand the customer mix. And a location that seems strong on footfall data might look far less convincing once you see who’s actually generating that footfall. 

How customer insight changes site, format and marketing decisions

As well as influencing whether to invest in a location, understanding your customers helps determine how you show up there. That’s why it is important to identify and understand customers before deciding the right format, product mix or local marketing approach.

In our work, customer insight tends to influence three layers of decision-making:

1. Site selection - Does this location contain enough of our target customer type, and are there enough of them within a realistic catchment to justify the investment? This is the foundational question, and it's one that population data alone can't reliably answer.
2. Format and product mix - Which products or services are most likely to perform here, and which probably won't? This is why it is important to understand customer needs at a local level: because a location might have the right customer base overall, but the local mix of segments could point strongly towards one part of the offer and away from another. 
3. Growth opportunity - Sometimes the more interesting question isn't whether to invest, but how to make more of it. If a location has strong coverage of core customer types but also sits near a large group of additional customers who aren't currently being served, that's useful to know. It might inform products, partnerships, or even how the site is configured.

This is also where footfall data analysis earns its place. Footfall data shows how many people are moving through an area, but customer insight helps answer the more important question: are they the right people? Used together, they give a more complete view of performance and potential.



How to sense-check customer fit in a new location

Before backing a site, it helps to ask a simple question: Does this location just look promising on a map, or does it genuinely fit the kind of customer your brand wants to attract?

A useful sense-check starts with the customer segments already driving performance across the existing network. Once those segments are understood, they can be compared with the people living, working and spending time around a proposed site.

That gives teams a clearer view of whether the location supports the core offer, whether a different format would work better, or whether the opportunity depends more on marketing, partnerships or local positioning.



It also helps identify nearby customer groups that may be underserved. That can change the decision from a straightforward go/no-go call into a more detailed view of the kind of location the area can support.

Examples of customer insight changing the decision

It’s easiest to understand when you see it in practice.

For a major sports fashion retailer, we combined customer postcode data with CAMEO geodemographic profiles to build a detailed picture of the people already buying from the brand in established markets. That understanding was then used to identify similar audiences in newer markets, creating a consistent way to assess expansion opportunities across different countries.

Rather than treating every market the same, the retailer could use a consistent Consumer Index to identify where target customers were most concentrated and support smarter site development analysis across mature and growth markets. 

Read more about it in our Geodemographic Data for a Sports Fashion Retailer case study.

Costa Coffee faced a different challenge. Working with market research and CAMEO data, GMAP helped build a clearer picture of the Costa customer and used that insight to assess consumer fit across its UK partnerships network. 

This helped Costa assess which partner brands, formats and channels best matched its customer base, then prioritise the partnership opportunities most likely to deliver growth.

Read more about it in our Consultancy for Costa Coffee case study.

Although the objectives were different, both examples point to the same idea: understanding a location tells you where an opportunity might exist, understanding customers helps you judge whether it's the right opportunity and how best to approach it.

How GMAP connects customer understanding to network planning

GMAP combines data, software, and consultancy into a single way of working. Customer and geodemographic data sit within that, but the value comes when it’s linked to location intelligence and used to support real decisions.

On the software side, there are two main tools. MVPLUS focuses on understanding what’s happening now across a network - catchments, competitor presence, overlap between sites, and how well each location aligns with target customer types within reach.

IMPACT is used for scenario planning, helping teams test changes to the network, such as openings, closures, or relocations.

Consultancy brings it all together and is where the outputs get turned into decisions. Data and software can show you what's there; the consultancy layer helps you work out what to do about it and, importantly, whether the plan still holds up once reality gets involved.

The typical flow in a customer-led project is: 

• enrich customer address data with geodemographic profiling to build a clearer picture of who the current customers are
• use that insight to assess how well each location in the network, or each potential site, serves that customer type
• and then use scenario planning to test how different network configurations would affect coverage, reach, and commercial performance.

The risk of backing the wrong customer mix

Most location decisions feel more confident than they probably should. A site passes the catchment test, the footfall looks reasonable, and the investment gets approved - but the question of whether the right customers are actually there often doesn't get a rigorous answer.

When performance then dips, it often gets put down to trading conditions or local competition. But more often than not, the issue is that the customer mix wasn’t quite the right fit to begin with - and that wasn’t picked up at the time of decision-making.

That’s why knowing how to understand your customers matters alongside location analysis. It helps brands move beyond coverage alone and make better decisions about where to invest, what format to open, and how to shape each location around the people most likely to use it.

The starting point is usually simpler than it sounds - enrich your customer address data, understand who your customers are at a segment level, and test how well your locations serve them. To see what that looks like in practice, speak to the GMAP team today.