Looking into the Indoor Location Services Business Case
Advance Experts presents a Discovery Business Case document to support the financial decision when investing on indoor positioning and location services for community spaces.
Either retail environment or leisure and entertainment, community centers and campuses, decision makers and marketers need better understanding on the implications of the investment vs. the ROI, and potential monetization of the services between parties.
The Business Case is modelled on the basic components;
Costs
- Technology Licenses; software license cost (by year) granting the usage of the Application and SDK for other party application integration. It is measured by size of the premises where to enable the technology. It is also a necessary investment before implementation.
- Smart-App; basics included in the license providing positioning, there are additional costs on design and development, or integration over existing Apps at client side. There is no impact on existing IT environment. Neither need of expenditure on additional infrastructure or hardware.
- Operations; man-power dedicated to calibrating on-site venue and configuration of the mapping towards real location layout. It includes support services. One-time service, it is completed in few days based on size of location.
- Optional Services; consulting services rendering analytics and insights from the application as well as the use cases to define, configuration of campaigns, notifications, special reports per tenant etc. Enablement of the revenue streams in accordance with client goals and cooperation with marketing departments.
Revenue Streams
Next are some concepts on monetization and activation vehicles by using Location Active Mall App.
- Subscriptions; monthly fee to those tenants in the mall that want to acquire the reporting and insights on App user behavioral patterns, mall indicators, customer location value, leasing value per user located, and other indicators. Includes weekly dashboards with application usage and heat mall across the whole mall and points of interest. App is Free of charge for users and visitors.
- Campaigns; special fees for those tenants that want to use location services to promotes campaigns on App in similar fashion to Vouchers or Coupons with QR code triggered when user is passing by specific location nearby stores.
- Facility Services; these services provide citizens and visitors the possibility to use the application for emergency services, notifications, exit location, accessible areas location, and direct location sharing with relevant authorities.
- As part of the facility management services (FM personnel and Security companies for enabling real time location and tracking of agents and workers). It can be evaluated as costs savings due operational efficiency.
- Sponsorships; special fees allotted to those companies that want to position and promote Branding over the Map in the location and navigation Application
- Customer Engagement; value derived from the user experience gained for the Shopping Mall or venue due to the provision of the Smart application more enjoyable and better engagement tool for the users to spend the time and plan their journeys.
Additional revenue streams (not calculated)
In addition to the basic functionality and features presented by the application and platform, we can consider premium services and additional revenue stream coming from areas such;
- Gamification; game-based subscription model for special digital and physical games deployed using location services. Scavenger and Treasure Hunt type of activations with tenants, institutions, corporations or health and safety promotions from the municipality. Games can be chargeable or sponsored by corporations.
- Augmented Reality displays; special activation displays can be sold to outlets for promoting innovative items using AR display on stores and managed by Location Application.
- Community service Data; enabling your venue with indoor positioning technology brings the possibility to open the platform for B2B solutions making use of the capability. From the public service point of view, the local institutions have the possibility to obtain data-sets on indoors for supporting smart-city planning, citizen understanding and other existing geolocation data use cases already in place for the outdoor spaces.
- Once the indoor location positioning service is in place, it can be added to any existing App on the market via API and SDK integration.
- Loyalty Tokens; navigation routes and user experience usage of the App can be rendered in token * km walked as Loyalty program (like airmiles) for redeeming promotions on articles. This monetization stream goes in line with current Loyalty program of the mall or enhancing Loyalty programs of existing retail groups.
Considering the equation for cost/benefit, it is projected a ROI over year 1, with moderate to conservative scenario;
- 5 figure max total cost of solution/year
- 20% of tenant uptake for subscription
- Market price sponsorship fees
- Not-dedicated solution for operations support
- Unquantified revenues on gamification or loyalty schemes
A more aggressive strategy on the usage of positioning, analytics, operations mobility processes, and customer engagement features, will provide a positive case over Year 1 obtaining profits from month 9 of operations.