Harnessing rich data to revitalise a world famous high street
While traditional footfall solutions provide primary data on the number of visitors to a town or city, they do not offer any real insight into visitor identity or place or origin, making subsequent action planning difficult.
To overcome these limitations, we drew upon rich, reliable location data to enhance our client’s understanding of the city’s performance. This revolutionalised the way Bath BID could identify strategies for increasing visitors, generating actionable insights.
Using data to identify new opportunities
Data supplied by mobile network Virgin Media O2 and financial institution Visa uncovered behaviours that offered a new understanding of the way residents and visitors behaved and how they utilised the City Centre. The data gave Bath BID increased visibility of how people move around the city, including where and what they spend money on.
In addition to the raw numbers of visitors to city centre locations, we provided actionable insights on:
Visitor characteristics such as demographics and split of locals versus tourists
Spending habits and dynamics of Bath residents and visitors
How visitors are making their way around the city and the areas or activities that promote them to dwell
Improved visitor perceptions using insights derived from social media platforms
The aggregated, anonymised and General Data Protection Regulation-compliant data was delivered via an easy-to-use online dashboard, customised to the BID’s requirements.
Our online Movement Insights dashboard built a significantly more reliable, timely and representative long-term city evidence base compared to face-to-face surveys. This allowed stakeholders to deliver focused investment and funding to support priority campaigns to help rebuild the economic vibrancy of the City Centre and to plan activities and interventions to directly respond to opportunities identified in the data.
A more connected, resilient and successful city
Adopting a people-first approach, our data delivered new insights that will help to support the City to re-establish the world-famous thriving place that is more connected, resilient and successful.
The data helped reveal the continuing impact of working from home, the effects of changing travel patterns, the evolution of high street dynamics, the popularity of visitor attractions, the development of the night-time economy and much more. The data is also enabling the Bath BID to evaluate the success of its interventions and provide evidence back to the business community showing the impact.
Bath has reported improvements, including increased average spending at restaurants and improved results from marketing campaigns for key annual events such as the Christmas market. Our Bath client has been a tremendous advocate of the benefits and impact of using GHD’s Movement Insights solution.
“Bath is the first city to take this innovative approach to place intelligence, and we are proud to have been pioneers of this.”
- Allison Herbert, Bath BID
