Companies are thinking differently about resilience and risk, and the daily headlines make clear why.

As a result of COVID-19, every company, regardless of industry, is aware of its security posture. The founder of a small urban food-delivery business and a Fortune 500 executive with a global supply chain face the same questions: Where are the threats to my personnel and assets, and how can I maintain business continuity?

A decade ago, executives might have struggled to understand their vulnerabilities to climate risk or civil or political unrest. Today, in a fast-moving globalised world, they have to answer for a variety of threats: extreme weather, economic distress, geopolitical ambiguity, terrorism, infrastructure collapse, individual acts of violence, and pandemics. Consequently, C-suite leaders are escalating the priority of corporate security strategies, believing them as essential to a business’s long-term health as growth is.

It’s clearer than ever that prosperity requires newfound resilience.

Seeing the Threat Matrix

Every security threat has a spatial dimension—that’s why a geographic information system, or GIS, has become a key technology for mitigating risk and responding to disruptions.

A GIS map brings instant context, showing stakeholders in real time where risks and vulnerabilities threaten assets, people, and communities in any scenario.

The technology fulfils a centralising role in security, providing a common operating picture of location-specific factors like weather, traffic, social media chatter, and evacuation plans. It can perform tasks as basic as showing which roads are still passable in the midst of flooding, and as sophisticated as showing a real-time view of a corporate campus during an emergency. Perhaps most importantly, location intelligence—geospatial insight that enables better business decisions—helps companies prepare to meet threats before they even arrive.

Corporate Security, Then and Now

Corporate security is practically as old as business itself. The term “riding shotgun” dates back to the days of stagecoaches and highway robbery, when Wells Fargo hired employees to sit upfront in carriages transporting currency, holding a shotgun to deter thieves.

Today, corporate security is harder to define because it encompasses multiple disciplines. Strategically, it covers enterprise risk management: the policies and procedures an organisation deploys to strengthen itself against adverse events. One important example is using location intelligence to ensure that data warehouses and data back-up centres aren’t located in risk-prone areas, like those subject to flooding.

At the operational level, corporate security extends well beyond weather-related events. For instance, the recent spate of flash mob robberies at US retailers has earned the attention of corporate security teams. Other security teams are focused on executive protection—gathering risk intelligence and monitoring where key employees travel around the globe—and special event management.

The objectives and outlook of corporate security teams have changed as well.

In the past, physical security was often the focus—implementing locks and access controls, running security cameras and a CCTV network. Many in the industry came from law enforcement backgrounds, and a castle mentality prevailed—the inclination to raise barriers against possible threats or intrusions.

Today’s security and resilience professionals are more apt to talk about a “threat landscape”—a kinetic, dynamic paradigm in which a bank, for instance, might be vulnerable not only because it stores currency, but because it could be a symbol for non-state terrorists to attack. Accordingly, more people with intelligence backgrounds are entering the field. These professionals are using GIS technology to produce location intelligence that is more proactive than reactive; it helps identify areas at possible risk—from geopolitical, climatological, or other threats; uncover bottlenecks; and inform contingency plans to mitigate adverse effects and enable continuity.

A Changing World

Globalisation is reshaping the breadth and depth of the span of responsibilities for corporate security.

As companies expand into new and more dispersed marketplaces, they increase exposure to a wider array of risks—a concern the pandemic has made abundantly clear—and so they require a robust resilience strategy and high-calibre security professionals to manage it.

Regulatory bodies and insurance and reinsurance organisations have also begun exerting pressure on companies to improve security and accurately assess multiple categories of liabilities in locations around the world. With climate change poised to transform sectors like real estate and agriculture, resilience is becoming a priority for industries that may not have been considered highly vulnerable to risk in the past.

What’s happening today is not unlike the aftermath of 9/11, which also had a resounding effect on how  businesses think about threats. The attack helped raise awareness around “black swan” events—highly improbable, difficult to predict occurrences that can cause maximum damage. As a result, business executives have increasingly funded the creation of corporate security centres that are continuously on guard against dangerous developments in the geographies where the business operates.

Centralising Corporate Response to Threats

Large companies in particular are centralising and coordinating responses through a security operations centre (SOC) or global security operations centre (GSOC). These nerve centres monitor operations nationally or internationally around the clock, managing the flow of information and collecting and evaluating data as it pertains to risk. Most operations centres use GIS technology to show the company’s activities in real time worldwide—and create user-defined operational pictures of any activity that needs attention. The centres are similar in function to the state-operated fusion centres formed after 9/11 to facilitate a pull-push exchange of important information between agencies.

Companies often need this calibre of domain awareness because law enforcement may not be able to provide the degree of detail necessary for a corporation to mount the appropriate response to an incident. Operations centre teams can get an understanding of events before they’ve come to fruition or as they’re occurring, and push information up the chain of command more quickly than outside organisations can. This kind of centralised, location-specific intel proved invaluable during the pandemic. Security professionals who had been monitoring storms and other incidents quickly pivoted GIS technology to track and communicate updates on case counts, local shutdowns, and employee health and safety.

Securing Events through Location Intelligence

One of the areas that GIS-equipped security centres have most transformed is special event management.

Employing the latest technologies, a company can have a real-time view both vast and intimate of a large-scale complex event. A smart map or dashboard makes clear the layout of infrastructure like buildings and underground facilities, as well as points of interest like fire alarms and defibrillators, medics and cops, and areas where suspicious activity has been reported.

Layers of information can be peeled back or added as needed. Or security personnel might toggle between hard and soft zones of inner and outer perimeters—focusing, for example, on the neighbourhood surrounding a site to understand the situation better.

Linked up with other platforms, GIS-based analysis can go even deeper.

Professionals in the field carrying out tactical site surveys can update mobile devices to identify points of interest and immediately sync to the common operating picture. Using drones capable of real-time imagery capture, operations teams can quickly enhance a basemap with images of temporary structures like tents or barricades. The use of 3D technology allows for analysis of viewsheds and lines of sight—the ability to determine who can see what and be seen where. GIS visualisations reveal where shade will fall at a given hour, or how far a flood might overrun on a neighbourhood.

Unlike a static security operation plan written on a whiteboard or frozen on paper maps, a location-aware dashboard enables security personnel to be dynamic, responding in real time to where assets and threats are.

Forecasting and Mitigating Extreme Weather Risks

Another area where centralisation and location intelligence have bolstered corporate security is in anticipating and quickly responding to extreme weather events.

When weather disasters strike, each state marshals its own resources and handles its own response. But national or global companies exposed to the same risks may have to respond simultaneously across those locations.

The 2018 flooding through the Ohio River Valley and down the Arkansas River, for example, touched some retailers with a presence from Nebraska down to southern Arkansas.

A major chain with a GIS-savvy GSOC can begin to model the storm even before a raindrop has fallen, forecasting where and what the impacts will be and what precautions should be taken. Those models might show where rainfall could prompt river flooding, illuminate which roads and areas could be affected, and predict other downstream consequences.

The security team can communicate with offices and stores to let them know a bad storm is on its way, and to ready flood mitigation resources. Store staffs can also prepare for surges in activity, including traffic and high demand for certain products.

Beyond ensuring its own business continuity, a security operations centre can use location data to support the community and liaise with state and local government, deploying resources like water or tools to places in need. The effects of weather events tend to radiate outward, putting pressure on communities and areas further afield. People who are evacuating may need to find shelter or temporarily regroup in parking lots. A smart map can identify these areas before the need arises.

The same principles apply with other types of disasters. In the case of an earthquake, a GSOC can overlay shake maps on the company’s network of offices, warehouses, or stores to understand which are affected by an earthquake. Or during a tropical storm, a map with a layer of power outages can contextualise data about facilities and the grid in order for business leaders to make smart, fast decisions.

The Future of Corporate Security

Far removed from the days of shotguns and stagecoaches, the field of corporate security is radically evolving.

We’re already seeing the latest cutting-edge applications, including advances in indoor location tracking that use geomagnetic positioning and the frequency of metals within the building to yield a more accurate picture than ever before.

GeoAI promises to help companies process massive amounts of information with potentially huge benefits for security. Machine learning makes it possible to study millions of pictures and videos and learn to detect anomalies, like too many people crowded in one location, or a fire breaking out. Computers can learn to look for those anomalies in security data and video in the future.

And with new cloud-based innovations, companies that use GIS technology can now practice distributed collaboration. Organisations that traditionally compete to attract customers can now collaborate on security by sharing maps and information related to shared threats.

However sophisticated the technology might become, the fundamental goal of corporate security remains unchanged: to get the best data on which threats exist and where, and put plans in place to mitigate risk and maintain business continuity.

This article originally appeared in the global edition of WhereNext.

Sometimes it takes an audacious, even intimidating goal to inspire a company to find new levels of innovation.

That was the thinking behind the ambitious growth strategy launched in 2016 by an insurance firm based in the Midwest. With agile startups beginning to crowd the insurance market, company executives sought to reach more commercial and personal clients who could benefit from the firm’s high-touch, consultative approach. The senior leadership team set a goal big enough to catalyse new approaches to reach that customer base: grow its annual premium by hundreds of millions of dollars—responsibly and effectively for customers.

The growth plan was two-pronged: find new clients in existing markets throughout the company’s multistate territory, while also expanding into new geographies. Since the company sells policies through a network of thousands of independent agencies, executives needed to understand which offices and geographies showed the greatest potential for growth—and they had to do so using data to supplement their instincts. To expand at the scale and pace of the strategic plan, company leaders knew they needed data technology that could pinpoint and predict high-performing opportunities. They didn’t realize that would lead them to the four best practices of location intelligence.

Mining Data for Competitive Advantage

One of the first steps C-suite executives took was to hire a data and analytics officer from a financial institution—an industry where the ability to mine information for competitive advantage was already a main differentiator of success. He then recruited a team of data scientists and analysts with experience in big data applications like machine learning algorithms.

Powered by data savvy, an innovative corporate culture, and location intelligence, the company is on its way to attaining its strategic goals and outperforming the industry on growth and profitability.

Finding New Leads with Machine Learning

The machine learning algorithms core to the company’s data-powered growth helped accelerate and improve market analysis. The analytics team employed AI to comb through enormous datasets and produce conclusions and predictions on a scale the human mind couldn’t match. Combined with geographic context from location intelligence, machine learning algorithms gave executives insight on where growth looked most promising.

By feeding the algorithms huge amounts of company and third-party data, the analytics team could teach models to recognize the variables that signal growth potential. Based on analysis of historical patterns, the algorithms can recognize that an agency located in a town with a certain set of demographic and geographic attributes should generate a certain level of business.

The resultant GeoAI-powered map helped automate processes, saving the sales team hours, if not days, by singling out the best leads for new distribution points in areas where the firm had no presence.

Instead of guesswork, decision-makers draw conclusions based on facts and patterns surfaced by AI.

A Map Key to Communication and Risk Assessment

The segmented smart map made it easier to share information related to the growth plan across departments. Instead of searching through files or charts, colleagues consulted a GIS-powered dashboard showing the location of partner agencies, competitive agencies, and possible areas of expansion.

The analysis was further refined to reflect different lines of business, which depended on different data inputs and were projected to grow at varying rates. Using GeoAI-based analytics, the team segmented those variables and delivered useful smart maps to executives responsible for each line.

When we talk about GIS . . . it can apply to all aspects of our business, whether that's identifying where customers are and what their needs are, or distribution.

Chief strategy

officer

Risk Assessment in the Age of Climate Change

Executives knew that growth at any price wasn’t smart growth, so they focused on sustainable ways to expand. Location intelligence enabled them to move into new territories at a fast clip while sidestepping rising threats from climate-related volatility and natural disasters. Company underwriters could look at current policies and literally see on a map where they stood in relation to existing or potential hazards.

For example, the data analytics team helped build a tool that allowed underwriters to plug any address into a search bar. An automated geocoding service calculates how far that point is from the closest shoreline. This capability gives underwriters a better sense of threats to a property or business from events like hurricanes or other severe weather, resulting in an analytics-backed assessment of whether to assume the risk in the first place.

Underwriters used the same tool to analyse existing policies and identify misclassified risks. Some policies were actually closer to the coastline than had initially been recorded, while others were farther away. In both cases, accurate geospatial insights helped the company fulfil the core business function of appropriately taking risk.

Automation aided the process by adding new or updated data to the national grid. “That’s a big time savings just from a model maintenance standpoint,” the analytics director says. “It frees up our data scientists to do more value-add work rather than updating and changing data.”

The four A’s of location intelligence also make it possible to contextualize information that might otherwise be treated as disconnected data points, discarded, or shrugged at in other firms. Instead, analysts were able to discover patterns that make the company more competitive.

For instance, a hot spot analysis of claims around one Ohio city revealed areas where customers were reporting damages at higher levels than seen in the past. By overlaying data like population growth over the geographic clusters where claim activity increased, managers could determine whether the uptick was simply due to a larger volume of residents. That insight could trigger the company to allocate more claims adjusters to the area.

Alternately, if those claims happened to coincide with clusters of hail storms or other climate-related trends, the information might lead executives to slow the pace of policy writing there, or change the kind of products available.

The future is: how do we leverage . . . additional data variables, how do we become more predictive, and how do we manage the risk more effectively?

Chief strategy

officer

A Suite of Data Technologies

Company leaders began with an ambitious goal, then put the right talent in place. The data science team translated the strategic ambition into algorithms and smart maps that could point the company toward growth, agency by agency, juxtaposed against potential risk. That GIS-powered location intelligence was made possible by a suite of technologies working in tandem: the insights of analytics, the predictive modelling of artificial intelligence, the efficiency of automation, and the processing power of the cloud.

“Whether it’s our heat maps or our competitor footprint on there, everyone gets it,” the analytics director says. “It’s immediately obvious what you’re trying to do. You want quick understanding, you want recall, and hopefully it drives quick action. To me, mapping does those things.”

This article was originally published on the global edition of Wherenext

Our earliest memories of maps tend to be of flattened, 2D images: wall-mounted world atlases in grade school classrooms, thumb-worn TripTiks in the glove compartment of the family car.

While these paper-based maps offered a helpful sense of place, they couldn’t realistically convey the vastness of the continents and oceans, or show the deep tapestry of neighbourhoods and landscapes glimpsed in passing on road trips. And they certainly couldn’t read real-time data from a mobile phone or weather sensor.

Thanks to cutting-edge geospatial technology, maps today are that smart. Coordinating layers of data from countless sources, a geographic information system, or GIS, turns dots and lines into an intelligent nervous system, or smart map.

GIS-powered maps capture the richness of geographic context: the socioeconomic contours of a city’s population, topographic features surrounding a proposed solar farm, the proximity of real estate to the coastline or other points of interest. This insight, known as location intelligence, has made smart maps indispensable in mastering the new data-driven frontiers of business, from health care to retail, logistics to manufacturing.

Enabled by advances in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and satellite imagery, digital maps can now function as living organisms, sensitive to historical trends and real-time data, able to forecast the future based on the present and past.

The ways that companies like FedEx, Carhartt, and BP are using smart maps today can be categorized into five areas of innovation where location intelligence from GIS is driving transformative change:

• Better investments and executive decisions
• Improved sustainability and equity
• New levels of efficiency and business resilience
• Data-driven customer responsiveness
• Increased collaboration and communication

In this new age of mapping, data isn’t left inert in spreadsheets or documents, but is infused with spatial meaning that yields competitive advantage and guides ethical corporate stewardship. Here’s a look at how that happens.

1. Grounding Investments and Executive Decisions in Geographic Truth

When company leaders confronted fluctuations in their business in the past, they often had to speculate about underlying causes. GIS’s ability to illuminate trends in data across time and space can take the guesswork out of important questions. Smart maps reveal the complex ecosystems that connect a store, office, or service centre to the surrounding community, giving executives guidance on the best ways to allocate time and capital.

A hospital seeing declining patient visits in a once-stable market might attribute that phenomenon to any number of factors, from poor outreach to changes in health-care policy. By studying the market on a smart map, the leaders of one hospital network discovered that a rise of competitors in the area was the main source of the patient drop-off. That geospatial analysis helped executives respond to the competition, instead of wasting resources chasing a solution to the wrong problem.

Such acuity is even more valuable in newer fields that don’t have decades of results to learn from.

Driven by lower costs and greening consumer sentiment, energy producers today face a surge of demand for renewable or carbon-free energy. Clean energy providers use GIS to understand the complex factors that influence the siting of offshore wind farms and other new power sources. Smart maps make it possible to visualize seabed geology, water, and wind patterns, as well as how new structures would connect to existing infrastructure.

By unlocking competitive advantages concealed within data, location intelligence makes decision-making at the highest corporate levels less an article of faith and more a fact-based exercise.

2. Smart Maps for the Era of Corporate Social Responsibility

On urgent issues ranging from sustainability to racial equity, the C-suite is rising to the challenge of social responsibility and stakeholder capitalism, with industry leaders like Google and Nike pledging to change business models to reflect corporate obligations to society. Forward-looking executives are turning to location intelligence to illuminate the bridge between promises and action.

Smart mapping is helping one of the world’s leading refiners of palm oil monitor the plantations it works with to determine whether suppliers are contributing to deforestation. Satellite imagery gives business leaders eyes on tens of millions of acres where encroachment or harmful practices might be occurring. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence enables the automation of imagery analysis, using metrics like proximity to roads or distance between plantations to predict areas most likely to be vulnerable to logging. That predictive capacity allows the company to take proactive steps while reducing the need for on-the-ground trips.

GIS makes the supply chain more transparent, ensuring that the palm oil it moves can be traced back to the mills where it was originally processed. The company is able to stay in line with industry-wide compliance efforts while reducing brand and environmental risks.

Smart maps are also playing a role in reversing one of the most damaging trends to marginalized populations in the United States: redlining, or the practice of refusing loans and mortgages to non-White communities and immigrants. This systemic prejudice has created economic deserts with low rates of entrepreneurship and homeownership.

One firm is attempting to spur economic growth in such places by using location intelligence, targeting areas where local populations don’t have access to fair banking—a fact that has typically left residents at the mercy of predatory institutions like payday lenders and check cashers. Instead, this microfinance pioneer employs smart maps to find neglected neighbourhoods using anonymized data on metrics like income levels and country of origin. Offering small fixed-interest loans in underserved areas creates ripples of positive economic change, contributing to growth in household wealth, business creation, and community health.

As more leaders in the Fortune 500 and beyond join the movement to instil corporate social responsibility into their operations, GIS is becoming an essential tool to align sustainability and equity goals with everyday practices.

3. Achieving New Heights of Efficiency and Business Resilience

Imagine the difficulty of tracking 20,000 aircraft flights each month, many of them carrying not only packages with delivery times to hit but also replacement parts and tools needed to maintain other planes crisscrossing the globe.

The complexity of that logistical choreography led shipping giant FedEx to rely on location intelligence. Serving as the foundation of FedEx’s tracking system, smart maps display real-time progress for hundreds of jet aircraft and make it possible to pull up information about each plane and its cargo with a single click. Because of these efforts, only .025 percent of FedEx’s flights fail to take off within 15 minutes of scheduled departure times.

GIS excels at slicing through knotty logistics challenges because managers in charge of keeping trains and planes on time don’t have to sort through manuals, spreadsheets, presentations, or PDFs for answers. They can go directly to shareable, interactive maps that show up-to-date data—in essence, a digital twin of the transportation network—allowing users to plan thoughtfully and adapt on the fly.

Responding effectively to the unexpected is a core element of business resilience, and it’s in such situations that winners often separate themselves from the pack. Almost no one predicted the scale of last year’s COVID-19 pandemic at the start. Yet the quick response mounted by Bass Pro Shops’ chief security officer, who was well-versed in GIS, helped the company maintain business continuity.

Dashboards displayed the operational status of the outdoor brand’s nationwide network of stores, color-coded to show which were closed, open, or partially open. That common picture united the efforts of the company’s C-suite, making it easier to shift inventory to the busiest stores and even allocate personal protective gear after the founder donated one million masks to frontline health-care workers.

Today, with Americans trusting CEOs more than their government, customers often turn to employers, top brands, and local stores for information and the goods and services they need in the midst of crisis. GIS gives business leaders the tools to keep pace with that level of customer demand, sustaining operational resilience in the face of disorganization and disaster.

With GIS-based smart maps, an overlay of data sources can form a common picture of the business, including COVID-19 infection rates and store sales numbers.

4. Crafting Customer Responsiveness Strategies

It’s not just the world that’s changing—customers change too, migrating to new digital platforms or shopping channels with a velocity that can catch businesses off guard. Companies that don’t have the agility to be more responsive to the needs of their client base risk losing ground to competitors.

• Everything from store design to safety measures can be tailored to better serve customers with insight from smart maps. Using geospatial technology, a design and engineering firm consulting on a new residential development in North London found efficiencies that allowed for a blend of affordable housing and desirable green spaces.
• A New Jersey utility combined headsets, augmented reality, and location intelligence to empower workers to “see” through concrete before excavating underground water and gas pipes. That technology avoids burst lines and costly repairs that might make busy roads inaccessible.
• Brands like Carhartt and Swarovski are employing smart maps to understand subtle shifts in consumer behaviour. And many retailers are realizing that a two-year-old market analysis on the income, education, and population characteristics of a given ZIP code won’t offer the kind of granular insight a brand needs to stay ahead today.

Customers now have a menu of retail options, from curbside pickup to online order and delivery. Understanding how, where, and why consumers are shopping the way they are is fundamental to crafting an omnichannel strategy. Mapping can plot out how those habits are changing daily so a company can better serve customers whether they’re walking in the door or connecting online.

The coronavirus pandemic perfectly demonstrates how forces outside an executive’s control can trigger new factors and microtrends that GIS is uniquely capable of tracking. Pandemic-related patterns—including that more men were shopping in-store than women during lockdown phases, or that some main avenues had less foot traffic than side streets—could influence strategic decisions. A CEO might use that location intelligence to decide which sites stay open, or how to target marketing to niche groups. Small adjustments can be the difference between survival and closure in trying economic times, and smart maps give companies that edge.

5. A Shared Platform for Collaboration and Communication

Communication technologies have advanced exponentially in recent decades. The time elapsed between the invention of the telephone and email was roughly 100 years, yet in just the last 10 years, we’ve seen a profusion of platforms—from social media to Slack—that are reshaping how we interact.

GIS is often found at the intersections of innovative change because maps are fundamentally shared platforms, inspiring understanding and collaboration like few other modes do. Employed on an enterprise level, geospatial analytics helped energy giant BP share data across departments otherwise siloed from each other. That has led to the creation of a new kind of analyst, one who is “bilingual” in the business vernacular of executives and the GIS analysts who track the latest developments in data science.

The connective power of location intelligence has extended even to the ski slopes, where old, analogue modes of information often left important details about infrastructure locked in the minds of employees. When that information was instead coded into a smart map of the mountain, everything from repairs to snowmaking became simplified and streamlined, contributing to even more economic success.

Even with the recent tectonic shifts in technology and commerce, certain concepts remain fixed in the human mind, fundamental to our understanding of the world. A map is one such archetype. Adapted from paper form to the digital realm, where they enable new advances in pattern-finding and strategic planning, maps have never been more powerful than they are today as agents of business change.

This article was originally published on the global edition of Wherenext

A new survey of business and engineering students and their employer preferences offers vital insights on the next wave of the global labour force. By assessing the survey data country by country, corporate leaders can divine trends that give them a competitive edge in recruiting the best talent in locations around the world.

In one of the biggest takeaways, the 2019 Universum World’s Most Attractive Employers survey found that job security rates as the highest priority among new graduates, contradicting assumptions that Generation Z shares the Millennial reputation for job-hopping.

Also, where students once prized international careers, uncertain economic conditions seem to have prompted young workers to stay home, whether in China or the U.S. By taking these and other Gen Z preferences into account, company leaders can tailor strategies to specific geographies as they market themselves to tomorrow’s workforce.

The Desire for Future-Proof Employment

The study, which surveyed 247,235 business, engineering, and IT students in the Americas, Europe, India, Russia, and Asia, found a “decade-high percentage” of students favouring employment security. Trade wars, tariffs, and political and economic change have led students in the world’s twelve largest economies to seek so-called “future-proof” jobs which can withstand economic flux.

Hand-in-hand with this mindset is a marked preference for working in the country of one’s origin—a trend especially notable in China. That was one of the biggest changes in Gen Z preferences in recent years; in 2019 just 27 percent prized an international career, compared with 32 percent in 2016. This finding is backed up by broader trends: an article in The Economist reported that in 8 out of 10 sectors, multinational companies are growing at a slower rate than domestic companies.

When Universum conducted its study 10 years ago, 5 of the top 10 companies favoured by Chinese students were Chinese brands. In 2019, that number grew to eight. The top five preferred employers for Chinese students are all Chinese companies, and multinational tech giants like Microsoft and Google have fallen off the top 10 list entirely.

Companies that once marketed international careers as an advantage may now want to advertise opportunities for education and growth within the domestic business.

Locational Variance—How Countries Differed on Work Priorities

In 10 of the 12 countries surveyed, business students ranked work-life balance as their top preference. Having a secure, stable job generally ranked second, while being a leader or manager of people was the third priority.

But in Mexico, for instance, this trend was nearly reversed. Gen Z students reported leadership as most important, with security and stability third, suggesting a rising class of workers with managerial aspirations who aren’t afraid of risk.

Russia was the other notable outlier. There, students named stability as the number one priority. Their second-highest priority: being competitively or intellectually challenged—a fact which companies seeking to hire in Russia could address in marketing materials.

Engineering and IT students largely broke down along the same lines as business students on the first two priorities, but their third-most important interest proved more diverse geographically. Being entrepreneurial or creative/innovative ranked third for up-and-coming professionals in Brazil, China, and Germany. South Korea was the only country to include autonomy and independence among their top three job preferences, while India was the sole nation to select being a technical or functional expert and having an international career as top priorities.

A Location-Savvy Recruiting Strategy

Whether companies are working to recruit international talent or homegrown employees, location-based insights can be the difference maker in finding the best-suited job applicants. That application of location intelligence can drive HR strategy, which in turn drives business performance.

In one example, the chocolate company Hershey, facing slowing growth in its traditional markets, predicted new customer opportunities in the emerging urban middle class of the Middle East and Asia. After studying the local demographics, company planners located a young, productive workforce near the city of Johor, Malaysia. A deeper analysis of the psychographics of the labour pool helped the company tailor the facility’s layout and operations to employee preferences for language, religious practices, and job training.

It’s another example of how incorporating location-based data—whether on the latest employment preference survey or shifting demographics—can help companies arm themselves with the best talent for the future.

This article was originally published in the global edition of WhereNext.

The use of psychographics - which is about the ability to connect, persuade, and influence people - has entered the mainstream of high-stakes arenas, including the 2016 US political elections. But political strategists aren’t the only ones gravitating toward this form of big data analytics - leading companies are as well. 

Psychographics versus Demographics: What’s the Difference?

For decades, pollsters, product marketers, location planners, and others used US Census data to segment people who lived in the same geographic location. A typical demographic segment might include white females, 25 to 34 years old, with a yearly salary of $45,000 to $54,999. If that group were to make up a certain percentage of a city’s population, a high-end fashion retailer might open a store downtown.

But demographic data reveals little about those women’s interests or aspirations, and those are the characteristics that drive people to shop at a particular store or vote for a certain candidate. With that information, companies can target their marketing more effectively and avoid investing in less profitable geographic areas.

Psychographics broadens the scope from focusing on who a person is, to what that person believes in. Psychographics identifies lifestyle habits, values, attitudes, and other defining attributes.

(To explore the psychographics of your neighbourhood, enter a location in this Zip code lookup tool.)

Armed with psychographic insight, a car manufacturer that’s focused on sustainability can launch dealerships in areas where people prefer a green lifestyle. A bank scouting locations for its next branch might use psychographics to avoid overinvesting in neighbourhoods where people prefer online banking. A retailer will use psychographic data to identify cities with high concentrations of outdoor-recreation lovers, then stock stores appropriately and target ads in the social media channels where those prospects spend the most time.

Insight for the Taking

In a presentation at Columbia University’s 2016 Concordia Summit, Alexander Nix—of consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, the firm that consulted Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on psychographics - revealed a startling statistic. “We have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every adult in the United States,” he told the audience.

In all that psychographic data, there is insight, but that insight won’t arrange itself. Organizations like The Shopping Center Group are using GIS technology to chase it out.

“Clearly, demographics and geographics and economics will influence your world view,” Nix said in his presentation. “But equally important, or probably more important, [is] psychographics that is, an understanding of your personality. Because it’s personality that drives behaviour.”

This article was originally published in the global edition of WhereNext.