Footprint is an Experian Mosaic and CACI Acorn alternative built for franchise brands and the consultants who advise them. It ranks all 7,264 neighbourhoods (MSOAs) in England and Wales for your business using Census 2021 and other public data, explains its top picks in writing, and starts at £369 a month. Mosaic and Acorn remain the better fit for a supermarket modelling 50 new stores. For a franchise team asking where to look next, Footprint does the job at a fraction of the cost.
Here's how we got here, and how the two approaches compare.
Life before Footprint: the spreadsheet years
Before we built Footprint, franchise expansion research looked like this. Open Google Maps, zoom into an area you already know, pull some Census numbers into a spreadsheet, run a few competitor searches and write up a recommendation.
It works well enough, and people find good sites this way. But every time you finish a project, one thought nags at you: all the areas you never looked at.
On a good week you can properly evaluate maybe ten neighbourhoods. England and Wales has 7,264. So you end up recommending whichever areas came up in conversation. Someone mentions Cheltenham, so you look at Cheltenham. It might be a great fit. You picked it because someone mentioned it, though, and nothing in the data pointed you there.
Enterprise tools exist, of course. Experian Mosaic and CACI Acorn are the standard for large retailers doing site selection. Their annual licences also cost more than some franchise units spend on rent. If you're a franchise brand with 15 units and a consultant helping you find the next five, those platforms aren't aimed at you.
That frustration is what led us to build Footprint. We'd seen how franchise expansion works in practice, and we knew the location research could be done better.
What do Experian Mosaic and CACI Acorn do?
Both are geodemographic classifications. Experian Mosaic sorts every UK household into 15 groups and 66 types based on demographics, financial behaviour and lifestyle. CACI Acorn does something similar with 6 categories, 18 groups and 62 types.
They deserve their reputation. If you need to model catchment overlap between two proposed supermarkets, or understand the spending habits of a narrow group of shoppers, they earn their price. Large teams and decades of data sit behind them, and they plug deeply into enterprise retail workflows.
A supermarket chain planning 50 new stores has a GIS department, a data science team and a budget that treats a six-figure licence as a rounding error. Most franchise networks have none of those.
Why don't they suit most franchise brands?
Most franchise networks run between 5 and 50 units. Expansion is often one or two people, or a consultant juggling three brands at once.
Those people need to answer one question: where in England and Wales should this brand open next. And the answer has to be affordable. A consultant whose client has 12 units can't justify £30,000 a year on location data. Fees would dwarf the value of the advice.
A segment code also leaves you with work to do. Knowing that an area is full of one Mosaic type doesn't tell you whether a £99-a-month fitness studio or a children's tutoring centre would suit it. Someone still has to turn the classification into a decision about your business.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Experian Mosaic or CACI Acorn?
Yes. Footprint is our answer. We don't have the proprietary household data that Experian and CACI hold. We use public data instead, most of it published under the Open Government Licence, and AI to apply it to your specific business.
You describe your business in a sentence or two, or paste in your website. Footprint turns that into search criteria you can read and change, then scores every neighbourhood on demographic fit, the local business mix and transport access. Results come back ranked and tiered, with a written explanation for each of the top areas. Competitor checks come next, on the areas you pick.
What data does Footprint use?
- Census 2021 from the ONS: age, household make-up, qualifications, employment and housing tenure.
- Indices of deprivation for income and deprivation.
- ONS UK Business Counts for the number and type of businesses in each area.
- Station usage from the Office of Rail and Road and Transport for London, plus NaPTAN bus stops and Department for Transport road traffic counts.
- Google Places for competitor checks, with names, ratings and reviews.
- Police and Environment Agency data for crime and flood risk when you check a specific unit.
What can you do with the results?
A ranked list is where the work starts. In Footprint you can:
- Shortlist areas, add notes and override a score if you know something the data doesn't.
- Check competitors in any area against Google Places.
- Draw walk and drive-time catchments along real roads around a high street or a dropped pin.
- Ask Footprint questions about your results in plain English, such as which shortlisted area to open in first or why one area outranks another.
- Track units through viewings, offers and heads of terms in a deal pipeline, and use "Check this unit" before a viewing (Pro and Scale).
- Hand over a branded PDF report (Pro and Scale).
How do we know the rankings are any good?
We tested Footprint against the real locations of 10 national chains, including Costa, PureGym and Specsavers, without showing it any of their 12,223 sites. Its top 200 areas were a median 3.3 times more likely than average to contain one of the chain's shops. It beat chance for all 10 chains at 95% confidence, and beat a simple ranking by population for 9 of the 10. When it knew the rest of a chain's estate, its top 500 areas contained 33.8% of the hidden sites, 4.3 times what random picks would find.
That test measures where chains trade. It says nothing about how well those shops perform. Footprint doesn't predict sales, and we'd be wary of any tool that says it can. You can read the full method and results.
When Experian or CACI is the right choice
If you're Marks & Spencer planning a nationwide store refresh, Experian is the right choice. It does that job well.
If you're a franchise brand looking for your next few locations, or a consultant advising one, Footprint is built for how you work. No GIS expertise, no six-week implementation and no procurement process. Plans start at £369 a month, and you can see results for your own business the same day. See pricing or try a search.
Key points
- Footprint is a UK site-selection tool and a lower-cost alternative to Experian Mosaic and CACI Acorn for franchise brands and consultants.
- It ranks all 7,264 neighbourhoods (MSOAs) in England and Wales for a specific business, using Census 2021, deprivation, ONS Business Counts, transport and Google Places data.
- Mosaic and Acorn sort households into segments (66 and 62 types). Footprint scores areas against your own business description and explains its top results.
- In a test on 10 national chains, Footprint's top 200 areas were a median 3.3 times more likely than average to contain one of the chain's shops.
- Footprint doesn't predict sales. It tells you where to look, and you still visit the street.
- Plans start at £369 a month.