EXPRESS: Propelling International Marketing Research with Geospatial Data

Going back to Huff’s seminal gravity model in the 1960’s, geospatial data has a long history in marketing research. Its applications in research and practice range from location-based mobile targeting of individual consumers to store competition analyzes and city marketing. Over the past decades, geospatial data has become more readily available than ever and has grown considerably in breadth (i.e., countries and regions covered) and depth (i.e., granularity and diversity of information covered). Nonetheless, international marketing research has not yet fully embraced the opportunities that geospatial data brings to the field. To address this shortcoming, this paper shows how geospatial data may propel international marketing research in various domains and develops future research questions for the field. In addition, it introduces OpenStreetMap (OSM) as a rich and open-source geospatial data source to the discipline. The use of geospatial data in general and OSM more specifically is illustrated through a concrete application in which the authors analyze city center composition in nine countries across three continents. In doing so, they reproducibly describe the extraction of geospatial data, constructions of metrics and operationalizations, as well as visualizations.