The Retail Coach: 21st Century help for business

YOUR DATA

We all know that marketing information is a big business in today’s world, and that information is often being gathered about us all the time. What we may not know how much is how detailed that information has become, and how that information is being gathered about us, often without our knowledge.

Meet The Retail Coach, the “retail economic experts.” Their website states, “We are a national retail consulting, marketing research and development firm that combines strategy, technology, and creative expertise to develop and deliver highimpact retail recruitment and development strategies to local governments, chambers of commerce, and economic development organizations.”

How they do all that is the interesting part. They track information about people and their traffic (movement) patterns through the use of mobile phones.

In pre-cellphone days, retail customer information was gathered for cities or businesses by recording cars license plate numbers to identify where cars were coming from.

These days is it all supplied by cell phone pings off phone towers. Your cell phone’s location is recorded, including the time and how long you are at a location. And for a city or business seeking tourism or retail dollars, knowing where the customers are coming from can be very useful data.

The Dripping Springs’ Chambers of Commerce is currently exploring using this information to plan future developments better. The Retail Coach is providing the data.

“Where are the customers? Where do they stop and eat? What is the market potential? Who is shopping here? These are questions that can be answered,” Aaron Farmer, Sr. V.P. of the Retail Coach said.

“We used to drive around Home Depot, downtown and HEB. Who was shopping here by reading the license plates…now cell phone calls and texts pings off (towers) with the area they’re coming from, the time of day, are they stopping for breakfast? You would want to see and understand just how big is this market.”

How big is the market actually? Dripping Springs is hard to keep up with new developments seemingly popping up overnight. “You have to grow the right way,” Farmer said.

“There’s been a market change with Belterra Village. The east is Cedar Valley, north and west is Johnson City, west is Blanco and south is Wimberley.“ Income is also included in the data with an average of $122,909 and the median age is 44.8 years.

“The information is not shared with anyone. It helps you understand, generally, where people are coming from,” Farmer said.

The Retail Coach “has been in business since 2000 and has the most projects of its kind in Texas. We’re very stable and have eleven employees across Texas and Mississippi with strategies all over the country.”

The are 80 different categories of businesses such as lumber or restaurants, that are calculated and the only type of business that has a surplus in this area is lumber and other building material. “Home Depot has its own marketing area,” Farmer said.

Knowing as much data as possible can help in planning where to put developments so that they are in the right place with no planning mistakes. Therefore making the area easily accessible for visitors and locals alike.

“The key is a community like Dripping Springs has to plan for growth. With access to that data you can plan five to ten years out,” he said.