For as often as I’ve heard talk tracks spanning multiple MarTech platforms about how marketers can now connect with their customers spanning all the channels in one place, I’ve found many brands I’ve worked with slow or reluctant to forge a path forward in launching into or expanding upon location-based targeting or personalization. Reasons for slow adoption have varied between prioritization of features, organizational silos, outsourced mobile app development resources, limited budgets or some combination of those reasons.

Those barriers notwithstanding, these are a couple common scenarios I’ve either seen in the wild or discussed with customers:

Scenario 1: Your customer enters within a radius of your store and a push notification is triggered about a ‘happy hour’ event going on later in the day

Scenario 2: Your customer is within a radius of a competitor to remind them of the sale you have going on at your store

By now, wouldn’t every business with a native app be doing either one of these? I floated this poll within my Linkedin network which represent a diverse swath of brand and agency/vendor side marketing professionals who are savvy enough to know what’s involved with enabling location services and, to me, their responses are a really good indication of what brands can expect to see in terms of if/when/how they can use location services on mobile devices and the inherent limitations. I’d say generally, these insights primarily apply to consumer brands, but I think set reasonable expectations for B2B marketers as well.

In summary:

• Only 1 in 5 of respondents enable location services for mobile apps ‘Most of the time’

• Nearly 50% of respondents enable location services ‘Sometimes’

• 1 in 3 respondents ‘Rarely’ enable location services

I asked a sampling of respondents for a little more detail about their answers and found that I could easily identify with everything that they shared and had some takeaways for marketers.

‘Most of the Time’ - Utility and convenience

“I enable location services for things that assist me directly. I'm able to save my parking location or for contact tracing as examples of a direct assist.” - Eric Hammond, Executive Director, All Software Consultants

“I do it most of the time to identify what store I am shopping and so I can check inventory.” - Jessica Higgins, The Home Depot

“I go ahead and give permission because I hate going back and changing the setting when I attempt to use a feature that requires it. I don’t always know what the location benefit will be but I am willing to see. I do like to receive offers based on location or if I am ordering something I like saving the steps of entering my location details. - Laura Hanley, Synovus

’Sometimes’ - insights, localization, privacy, battery, value

“I enable location for some apps - but generally only while the app is in use, and if enabling location services gives me a key benefit of using the app. For example, in my Adidas Running app, it's useful to track my location so I know how far I've gone as I try to shave seconds off of my mile time. Another example - when playing daily fantasy sports, you have to enable location services so the app can verify that you're in a state where you're allowed to use the app. Also the NBA app requires that I enable location so it can know to black out Atlanta Hawks games from streaming. If there's no inherent reason for an app knowing my location, I don't allow it. Amazon doesn't need to know where I am physically located at any given time. Neither does AirBnB or Doordash.” - Aaron King, Founder, Fusion 75

“I enable locations services 'sometimes' for 2 reasons. First, to limit my digital trackability. And second, to preserve battery life on my mobile device. But because I already feel about as digitally-naked as I can be, the primary driver is battery life. Which means that I don't mind you seeing everything there is to see about me as long as my battery is swole.” - Adam Albrecht, Founder, The Weaponry

“[It] really depends on the app and what it’s purpose is and it’s almost always only while using app - running, yes. weather, yes. yelp, yes, etc. otherwise, i prefer to not share my location.” - Ester Kim, Kimberly-Clark

“Ultimately unless there is some benefit to me I will not enable them to know my location. The app would have to convince me that them knowing my location would lead to exclusive deals or something else that would genuinely matter to me.” - Hilary Cooper, HD Supply

‘Rarely’ - Privacy

“I'm pretty cautious about giving any app or service more access to any of my data then I deem necessary. Because I live in this space, I understand the many uses data like this can be utilized not only for good purposes but also malicious intent. Plus, why do you need my location on? Let me tell you where I want you to be.” - Nalini Humphrey, AT&T