GapMaps takes the guesswork out of your location planning decisions

While working at McDonald’s and Burger King, Anthony Villanti realised that developing strategies for the geographical expansion of fast food brands was highly manual and cumbersome.

Project consulting involved carrying out costly and time-consuming market surveys to understand customer movement patterns and using pins on paper-based maps to visualise existing store networks and competitor locations to help brands find gaps in the market.

Villanti decided to use his over 20 years of experience in demographics, mapping and market impact analysis across Asia Pacific to create a novel way to address this problem and effect a change.

That was the beginning of GapMaps.

Established in 2013 and headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, GapMaps offers a cloud-based location intelligence and data mapping platform to help network planners make faster location decisions. GapMaps Live provides accurate, up-to-date, validated information about locations. Retailers can use these maps while expanding their store network or optimising existing stores.

Also Read: Hyperlocal mapping: a solution for real-world interactions in retail metaverse

“GapMaps Live allows retailers to visualise their own store network along with competitor locations, resident, worker, and consuming class populations down to the micro level. This way, they can make faster and smarter decisions when planning their store opening, closing and growth strategies,” Villanti tells e27.

If a business needs data that doesn’t yet exist or needs accurate and granular insights in a data-challenged country, GapMaps will build new datasets combining available population data with billions of mobile device location points.

“GapMaps enables brands with physical stores in multiple countries to have one login to manage all their locations. For example, a parent company with a series of different brands operating in different regions can now see and compare the locations of their brands everywhere. Having this data at their fingertips brings many efficiencies and speeds up business planning and decision-making,” he goes on.

Customers can also ingest their own large datasets into GapMaps Live, visualise them through thematic layers, and show comparisons with available data on the platform.

For example, brands can upload sales or customer data to visualise their best and worst-performing stores at a suburb or postcode level and then understand the demographic profile of customers in these locations.

“The granularity of digital data available in GapMaps Live means that demographic insights are accessible for retail stores with the smallest catchment areas. Even café catchments, which are typically no larger than a radius of 250 metres, can now be assessed to determine the count of residents (by Socia-Economic Classification grouping) and workers as part of a location feasibility process,” he adds.

As of today, the firm has more than 500 clients across 23 countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Myanmar, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India. It counts brands such as Domino’s, KFC, Starbucks, Burger King, Subway, McDonald’s, Anytime Fitness, and Goodyear among its clients.

It also has a presence in the Middle East, Africa, and Oceania.

Clients pay an annual license fee to access the GapMaps platform. It also has a range of tiered pricing options that vary based on the number of districts, cities or countries clients require our location intelligence insights.

Doubling down on India

India is a preferred market for GapMaps where the growth opportunity is significant. While it represents about seven per cent of its business from domestic and global brands, GapMaps expects it to increase to 25 per cent in 2023 and 40 per cent by 2024-end.

In India, GapMaps mainly targets fast food and quick service restaurants, cafés, fitness and well-being, supermarket, and grocery stores. Anytime Fitness, which operates 110 fitness clubs across India, has used GapMaps Live to enable greater precision in its decision-making when opening new locations.

Speaking of the challenges, Villanti says that as the business continues to mature, cyber risk threats to cloud-based software are on the rise. “We strive to ensure we have a strong security posture and comply with SOC 2, ISO27001, and GDPR.”

A privately funded company, GapMaps foresees significant uptake in the business post-pandemic. “The COVID-19 pandemic has had a massive impact on population movements, with fewer people now travelling to the city for work, and people spending more time working from home and moving around in their local suburbs in greater numbers. This also impacts traffic patterns,” he says.

GapMaps Live is helping brands analyse these population movements through mobile devices (visitation data) and census data and understand their impact on their network. This shift is essential across various sectors, including QSR, fitness, supermarkets, childcare centres, healthcare, etc.

“Many of our clients in the QSR and Café sectors are now assessing the catchment potential of a new (or existing) location for the in-store and takeaway potential and, increasingly, the delivery potential. This trend towards delivery is not a pandemic post phenomenon. However, the pace of change has accelerated, and few expect a return to pre-COVID-19 delivery demand.

Post-pandemic, many small retailers are also critically examining their presence in shopping malls. Until recently, retailers assessed the potential of a new shopping mall location by considering the floor area of the mall, the brands that might be present and the catchment population and demography within a primary and secondary catchment.

“Those factors will always be important. However, they can now be complemented with insights relating to customer visitation patterns. For example, how long does a customer typically spend at the mall (long stays are good for food and beverage retailers and short stays are good for fresh food retailers), how far do customers travel to reach the mall, how busy is the mall over the seven days of the week and also by time of day.”

According to Villanti, GapMaps listens daily to hundreds of customers and thousands of users. “By taking the time to understand how you think about your business, we can overlay you and your sector and business meaningfully over our facts and expertise. So everyone can understand it. It means every decision you make is informed, aligned, and you’re in total control of it.”

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