Location-based services – the market: success factors and emerging trends from an exploratory approach

ABSTRACT By measuring the possibilities of enterprises linking location-based services (LBS) to regional and local content of interest, research found a tremendous lack of knowledge, how media enterprises – as well as content providers – in- and outside legacy media can use innovative LBS. One could presume that the absence of fulfiling market-information about current LBS proves to be a decisive factor causing a poor implementation of LBS in content-related services especially for media outlets. This contribution aims to fill this gap by providing an innovative, new kind of market exploration method for creating a general overview of current applications and, with that, the entire market for LBS, based on specific mentions of LBS in tech-related newsletters. The resulting category system (focusing on providers, areas of application, functions and technologies) enables the identification of success factors concerning which services are well established, and how this is linked to the type of application, technology, business models and other characteristics. The findings reveal the application of location analytics to enhance the user experience to be a particularly promising opportunity for current LBS implementation. With its completely new method, the study provides a much-needed new framework for further market explorations in this field.