Business Insider reported last week that Amazon Prime membership has penetrated the majority of homes, including the coveted higher income households. With Prime membership over 70% in the “high income” households, this elevates the fierce competitive battle for traditional brick and mortar retailers, grocers, and even restaurants.   

To protect market share, retailers are investing billions of dollars to optimize “in the funnel” sales traffic, from building robust instore Wi-Fi tracking and GPS proximity targeting, to building huge data crunching teams to identify new insights on previous customer purchases, etc.

Despite the staggering levels of new technology investments, the question remains…… are retailers creating a quantifiable advantage or even holding their share of wallet?

Recently, innovative retailers have begun making investments to analyze customers’ location data, which provides essential, additive context to uncover buying intent. It also creates new predictive audiences at the top of the funnel.

How is location so additive and valuable? Because these insights are based on customers’ highest level of commitment—what they choose to do in their personal time, which reveals their key lifestyle patterns and uncovers their true interests and affinities. Retailers are now “seeing” the advantage of understanding how mobile consumers go about their daily lives, engaging in local events and activities such as shopping, dining, attending musical events or running in 5K races.

We are strong proponents of retailers understanding the lifestyle context of consumers along with traditional insights like demographics and purchase data. With these insights, retailers can not only grow their share of wallet, but protect their share from the new, big competitors, by generating highly relevant, interest-based offers by lifestyle context segments.