Geographic mapping ...
Use mapping software for media planning, to expose new market opportunities, locate and profile prospects and customers, take account of regional competition, geographically relate product mix to demand, determine market penetration, build market share, strengthen customer loyalty, optimise site locations/resources, evaluate sales performance and balance territory workloads! MapPoint 2004 in particular links directly with KbaseT for refined targeting by making geographic selections direct on a map!
Comprehensive marketing, postal, geographic datasets are available - please call on +44 1733 890790.
More than 85% of the information held in corporate databases has geographic
attributes including telephone numbers, Postcodes, or addresses. This makes it possible to
analyse almost every relationship in business using the impact and visual clarity of maps.
In sales, marketing and customer service there is simply no better way to visualise
geographic data than with maps. With maps you can see where things are, not just what they
are.
Retail management and site location selection
Sales area and franchise territory management, balancing and re-organisation
Direct mail campaign analysis, planning/targeting
Media selection, placement and analysis based on geographical area coverage
Identification and location of new target markets
Competitor activity analysis
Lead allocation and product distribution logistics
Improving decision-making criteria and analysing branch performance
Market research and identifying buying patterns and market and demographic trends
Identification of possible geographically biased problems
You probably already use wall maps to display and analyse data in your company. Colourful map pins mark the location of key customers or represent office locations. But maps can do much more than hang on your wall.
Computerised maps can display otherwise hidden relationships between customers and territories ensuring you stay highly competitive whilst enhancing the quality of customer service. They can reveal prime business locations, clarify distribution strategies and help improve productivity in high cost areas. Maps can be used to analyse promotional alternatives and determine optimal product mixes for different regions. Information revealed in maps can be the primary input for major strategic decisions, and modern personal computers put map-based analysis within the reach of any company.
We offer three mapping systems to enable you to enhance your analysis by viewing data through multiple layers of geography. Tactician - marketing orientated and better suited to larger data files, MapPoint - the most cost effective solution and MapInfo where the requirement is more general and may need direct drawing capability. Both systems have pros and cons - call us.
Whereas MapInfo runs in a single dimension mode for all applications, Tactician uses 3D spreadsheets and has three optional ways of working - Standard for straightforward data display and interrogation, Sites for creating and optimising distribution/retail outlet catchment areas and associated data, and Territories for optimising sales/support call balancing, territory optimisation, data assignment etc. With both MapInfo and Tactician you can search for and highlight a customer, prospect, distributor, etc., and produce a "Flash" report containing all relevant marketing data. Using either package in conjunction with MatchCode (or QAS) allows you to search and return locations by simply entering the Postcode.
You can plot, display and interrogate your data in various ways - by polygon (where shapes can be created and coloured to match data classification), by line (mainly used for roads and railways, although there may be a need to show lines by varying thickness depending on data throughput), and by points - the most common method if data has Ordnance Survey mapping coordinates attached. Linking of your data to a map is by a field called a Geocode which can be any alpha/numeric field. This ties to a corresponding cartographic layer in the software.
All cartographic files consist of descriptive labels together with sets of X and Y mapping grid coordinates which are used to accurately position the geographic attributes on the map.
For example, if you have a field in your database containing the postal sector details, you can match this against the postal sector polygon layer to display shaded or dotted data representation.
Alternatively you can match against the postal sector centroid - the polygon centre point - to display a symbol, an icon - either a fixed size or graduated depending on your data values, or bar/pie chart to depict classified data ranges. You can also undertake the same mapping exercise at Postcode Area and District level, or based on any other polygon structured cartography.
To show customers, competitors, etc., as separate dots, you would usually work at full Postcode level. You would first pass your data through GridBatch which adds Ordnance Survey grid coordinates to each Postcode on your file, then simply display the points/labels on the map.
The UK Postcode (ie. PE11 4AW) is structured as follows: Postcode Area (PE) - 120 in UK; Postcode District (11) - 2,900 in UK; Postcode Sector (4) - 9,000 in UK; and Unit Postcode (AW) - approximately 1.6 million in UK. Each unit Postcode covers approximately 15 properties.
With any market mapping exercise the key requirement is to first define an objective which is generally far greater than just displaying data. For instance, you may wish to display, analyse and select prospects based on their likelihood to take up a particular offer. What you could map is a likelihood score generated from SPSS, CHAID, etc., together with other marketing information - perhaps also overlaid with Census data.
SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY
With Tactician there are two system options -
1) Tactician - providing thematic, point and pin mapping; zoom, pan, jump to, and fit object controls; layer, overlay and calculate commands; execution of Tactician scripts; it’s also DDE compliant and can be developed with Visual Basic; features 3-D spreadsheet control for efficient territory and retail functions; manual territory redistricting with balanced territories; manual retail trade area definition; and can import from Atlas, MapInfo, etc.; a full function scripting language for custom applications and a query system for local PC compatible databases (Btrieve, dBASE, Excel, OS/2, Gupta, MDI gateway, SQL server, ASCII files);
2) Tactician Micro Marketing Machine - as 1) plus a retail merchandise gravity model (flexible sales predictor for retail sites - tests merchandising mix, competitive response), resource optimisation model ("what-if" service cost optimiser which solves spatial resource allocation problems), retail and brand regression model (statistical model to determine factors influencing sales), and the fast one million row database - data warehouse.
With MapInfo there is one system with the benefit of auto-remember programme generation for repeating mapping projects. Full details on request but features are mainly as Tactician with additional extensive drawing capability, raster image support, (but no 3D spreadsheet functionality) and two optional add-ons - MapBasic (stand-alone scripting/programming language) and SQL Data link (for SQL query access).
3) MapPoint 2004 - with Microsoft MapPoint 2004 you can undertake basic mapping including journey planning and drive-time calculations for incredibly low cost. MapPoint 2004 also links directly with KbaseT
UNDERSTANDING CARTOGRAPHY
Cartography is the term given to the various datasets which are used to provide the backdrop to your data. Datasets are available for the UK (and other countries) and include country, county, and region outlines;
Postcode area, district and sector boundaries; place names; urban sprawl; roads ; retail point locations (); rivers, canals, lakes; golf courses; ; and attribute data such as TV regions and the 1991 census statistics. Please call for details.
* UK Postcode boundaries - Area, District, Sector and Unit - polygons and centroid points, at various resolutions.
* UK point file to allow mapping data at full Postcode level. Postcodes include Ordnance Survey coordinates and unit household/business counts which are ideal for penetration analysis.
* AA data at various detail levels for the UK, Ireland, Europe and USA - roads (motorways, A, B, primary and unclassified), railways/railway crossings, rivers, urban town sprawls, town plans, places, golf courses, regions, coast, places of interest, etc.
* Point files for many types of retail outlets - i.e. Banks, restaurants, garages, grocery, chemists, confectionery, newsagents, building societies, department stores, etc., and places of interest.
* Census, ISBA/BABT, TV, ILR datasets and drive-time boundaries.
* ANY geodemographic and lifestyle profiling codes such as ACORN, MOSAIC, SUPER PROFILE, etc., can be used within mapping software can be overlaid on data to clarify customer profiles. You can therefore use which coding scheme works better.
One area of confusion is the scale of cartographic data vs. the cost variation.To clarify this, imagine the UK map fitting on one A0 sheet of paper (16 x A4 sheets). At this size a scale of 1:625,000 is suitable for general display. For greater detail - the UK map spread over 40 x A0 sheets, a scale of 1:100,000 is needed. For maximum accuracy - the UK map spread over 120 x A0 sheets, a scale of 1:50,000 is required.
To conclude, by visualising data in its geographical context, Tactician, MapPoint 2004 and MapInfo reveal otherwise hidden relationships in marketing information and provides the platform with which to geographically plan business strategies based upon corporate and any externally sourced marketing information including geo-demographic and lifestyle coding.
There is no practical limit to the number of overlays that can be shown on the maps and each overlay can be set to display at different height ranges and can link to a separate data file if required. For instance, by zooming in on target locations different overlays will turn on and off to reveal or hide data depending on the user's preferences. Tactician, MapPoint 2004 and MapInfo also allow promotional target areas to be directly carved out and selection criteria in KbaseT automatically updated, a link to SPSS for statistical analysis, and the use of shaded maps to geographically analyse data from SPSS and KbaseT.
