Human movement and population patterns are constantly evolving. However, this has never been truer than in the last decade, and specifically in the past couple of years. Rapid change has been thanks to unexpected events and the fast pace of 21st-century living. In most recent years, they can be attributed to four key drivers:
- Changes in eCommerce: where and how people shop has changed due to the expanding availability of convenient, on-demand, home delivery services and enhanced digital shopping experiences.
- Ridesharing & ride-hailing apps have gained popularity: people have more options for where, when and how they can travel from A to B.
- Increase in remote working environments: while already common in some industries, organizations are increasingly turning to remote offices or hybrid work environments – particularly as a result of the pandemic.
- The COVID-19 pandemic: the pandemic itself unexpectedly reshaped how people work, live and interact with one another. It has introduced long-lasting changes across every industry.
When human mobility data was first introduced, it was primarily governments and world health organizations that used its information. They predominantly relied on insights derived from cellular network locations.
However, today there is increased interest in mobility data from both the public and private sectors. It includes mobility data gathered from enabled smartphone apps. These reveal how COVID-19 altered movement patterns, both temporarily and in the long term. Organizations navigating an ever-changing global landscape are looking to human mobility data to help them make better strategic decisions for the future.
How Different Industries Can Leverage Insights from Human Mobility Data
With growing interest in understanding how populations move, enterprises across sectors are leveraging human mobility data. It enables them to make better decisions in a fast-moving world. Here are just a few of the ways human mobility data, combined with demographic information, can help corporations to adapt:
- Insurance: Gain further insights into the popularity of a location, the impact on claims, and therefore policy price. Companies associated with health and safety incidences can analyze more complex risks associated with popular areas and the types of people that dwell in those locations. This may relate to vandalism, fire, and attacks.
- Marketing: Improve targeting to better understand where consumers visit, live, and where they originate from. It drives location-based marketing to raise awareness, increase overall foot traffic, or promote specific events.
- Commercial Real Estate: Reasonably predict clients that might not renew their leases based on their demographic and footfall traffic in the area.
- Residential Real Estate: Help home buyers understand neighborhoods and identify popular locations. It provides data on the typical age range of people they can expect to be in the community. It also shows if it’s a quiet or busy neighborhood and other critical factors that impact whether they purchase real estate or not.
- Consumer Goods Retailers: Rather than follow trends, adjust product offerings to meet the demands of the population as it changes with them over time.
- Public Sector: Effectively manage outbreaks of infectious diseases and inform decisions about large infrastructure projects that support a growing or fluctuating population.
- Tourism: Reveal and predict travel behavior. Develop strategies to adjust to or accommodate changes in how and where people spend their leisure time. Enable targeted campaigns to specific audiences, and inform business and civic plans for strategic growth.
- Large Enterprises: Understand the populations that live, work, and meet in certain areas to forecast demand, organize supply chains and logistics planning. Assess commercial portfolios, identify gaps in the market, and understand shifts in demographics in the customer base.
The Winning Combination of Mobility Data and Demographic Data
When used alone, mobility data lacks demographic detail. Likewise, static demographic data lacks the concept of movement. However, when combined, they provide powerful and new visibility into deeply enriched population movement patterns.
Powerful new data products, such as Dynamic Demographics, integrate mobile location data with demographic data. It helps businesses understand customers, neighborhoods, and destinations. With this data, organizations can obtain granular insights into human mobility. They can create location profiles for any day of the week or any time of day.
All of these insights and pieces of information are highly accurate. They provide business leaders with the ability to make sound decisions based on the flow of people through that area. All this whilst ensuring data privacy is maintained through the use of fully compliant, aggregated and anonymized mobile phone records.
It’s clear that this new breed of demographic data products will be a game-changer for businesses in 2022 who are seeking to make impactful, trusted decisions based on the context of how populations move between locations. To learn more about how organizations can leverage insights from human mobility data, download the Human Mobility in an Evolving World eBook.
Precisely is the global leader in data integrity, providing accuracy, consistency, and context in data for 12,000 customers in more than 100 countries, including 97 of the Fortune 100. Precisely’s data integration, data quality, data governance, location intelligence, and data enrichment products power better business decisions to create better outcomes. Learn more at www.precisely.com.
