Propelling international marketing research with geospatial data

Geospatial data have a long history in marketing research that goes back to Huff’s seminal gravity model from the 1960s. Their applications in research and practice range from location-based mobile targeting of individual consumers to store competition analysis and city marketing. In the past decades, geospatial data have become more readily available and have grown considerably in both 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 bring to the field. To address this shortcoming, this article 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 as a rich geospatial data source to the discipline. The authors illustrate the use of geospatial data in general and OpenStreetMap in particular through a concrete application in which they 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, and visualizations.