The Double Jeopardy in high street footfall

Calls for empirical and theory-based outcome measures in the place marketing literature are made more pressing as policy makers manage post-covid high street recovery. Our aim in this paper is to evaluate how knowledge of repeat buying established in the consumer marketing domain might be adapted to benchmark place marketing effectiveness, applying the Law of Double Jeopardy to capture the predictable relationship between footfall and visit frequency on competing high streets.
We match footfall and survey data collected simultaneously on nine local high streets in one London borough to ask if a predictable Double Jeopardy relationship exists. We then test the theoretical assumptions of independence that underpin the Law in patterns of switching; the predictable distribution of regular, infrequent and new visitors; and the absence of user segmentation.
We observe that Double Jeopardy constrains behavioural outcomes, that a simple model fits high street footfall data well, and that its theoretical assumptions are supported.
The paper makes several practical and theoretical contributions. We demonstrate a method to model expected repeat visit frequency from footfall density and elaborate footfall data into its frequency classes. We locate the effects of loyalty over time within existing knowledge of spatial competition for high street patronage, and demonstrate how place marketing insights can be derived from applications of this useful law.