Location, location, location. It’s the linchpin of a franchisor’s success. To stay competitive and thrive, franchisors have to select the right markets to enter and distribute their locations without sacrificing their franchisees’ profitability or cannibalizing the market. As we know, poor location decisions are one of the top reasons franchises fail.   Franchisors need to tackle site selection from a position of strength, armed with solid market and consumer data to help guide their franchisees on opening in the right locations. Locate’s proprietary data gives you the knowledge you need to attack site selection with confidence. 

Let’s Look at Jimmy John’s

To demonstrate, we performed a market analysis of Jimmy John’s sandwich franchise locations. Using our proprietary technology, we identified potential locations in Texas markets where a Jimmy John’s franchise can open successfully without cannibalizing sales of franchisees in the area. Check out our findings in the map below. Red dot = target location for a new Jimmy John’s shop with no cannibalization Black dot = existing Jimmy John’s franchisee Each red dot on the map represents a market opportunity for Jimmy John’s. For example, our data tells us that Jimmy John’s qualified consumers (people likely to be JJ customers based on our mobile data technologies) are living, driving, and visiting buildings in the area west of Frisco, Texas in Little Elm, but the franchisor doesn’t have a shop in this location. Hence, our red dot.

How Do We Know This?

We leverage cell phone tracking and geofencing technology to collect vital, real-time information about your customers. In the case of Jimmy John’s, we analyzed data collected from hundreds of thousands of cell phones and location-based information to look at everyone who had visited a Jimmy John’s location in the last three years—where they came from, where they went afterward, where they work, and where they spend their evenings.  These insights enabled us to identify the top psychographic characteristics that make up Jimmy John’s customers on a market-by-market basis and in specific neighborhoods like the area west of Frisco in Little Elm. Using the psychographic data along with demographics, we compared customers in the neighborhood west of Frisco with customers who visit the Jimmy John’s franchises south of Frisco. The more similarities we found, the greater we assessed the likelihood of the red-dot Jimmy John’s location as being successful.

Open New Sites with Confidence

Locate is the first tech-enabled retail real estate brokerage.  Our approach is revolutionary to the industry and combines real-time data from over 180 million anonymous mobile devices with the power of AI. This technology, coupled with our deep real estate expertise, enables us to develop data-driven models you can use to confidently predict the success of future locations and make informed, risk-adjusted decisions on the fly. 

Fill out the form below if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you make the best-informed site selection decisions, stay competitive, and grow your brand: