Location-Based Proximity Marketing: An Interactive Marketing Perspective

Technological breakthroughs have made it possible to collect continuous live location information through mobile devices. As such, location-based data has greatly impacted the development of contemporary proximity marketing which takes into account “closeness” between two objects and this is further applied for marketing purposes. As information regarding specific customer locations on their movements into/out of a pre-defined virtual boundary can be detected and identified, through the interactivity between mobile devices and proximity hardware, pre-programmed marketing actions will be triggered and relevant materials will be delivered to customers at the right time and in the right place. These potential customers can eventually be guided away from their original consumption intention. Such geographic location-based, interactive proximity marketing has been receiving increasing attention from both practitioners and academicians in recent years. In this chapter, the authors attempt to clarify the concept, discuss its benefits, elucidate proximity marketing technologies, and illustrate practical implications. Further, a comprehensive review of the limited extant scholarly works is conducted. Through this review, a conceptual framework is thus developed. Finally, an agenda for future research is provided to serve as a base for future studies into this crucial and yet often neglected field of proximity marketing.