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Demographic data from Kingswood MapMechanics has proved a decisive factor in the rapid growth of specialist TV and consumer goods retailer Buy As You View. Having more than doubled its customer base in five years, the company now aims to increase it by over 50 per cent more in its current five-year plan – taking it to four times its size in the late 1990s.
IT director Martin Greenhalgh says the demographic tools supplied by Kingswood MapMechanics have been fundamental to this vigorous growth. “The system has proved invaluable at helping us identify new territories reliably, without having to go through a lengthy ‘trial and error’ process,” he says. |
Buy As You View allows consumers on lower incomes to pay for high-quality television sets literally as they watch, using a special coin meter. With this system, unlike rental, they end up owning the set. More recently, the service has been expanded to allow customers to buy a whole host of other goods through the same payment mechanism, including electrical appliances, furniture, sporting equipment and lifestyle products. Buy As You View stocks and supplies all goods through its own resources.
Having grown steadily over the past thirty years from its original base in South Wales, the company decided in the late 1990s to expand into other parts of Britain, and needed to identify areas with an appropriate demographic mix. Typically this meant areas with a high concentration of lower-income families, often living in smaller housing units, perhaps in locations that had seen extensive industrial upheaval in the past.
“Although we could have made educated guesses about likely locations, we needed to adopt a more scientific approach that would provide the maximum potential.”
Kingswood MapMechanics supplied the company with PRiZM demographic data, which Martin Greenhalgh’s IT team was able to cross-reference with existing customer data. There was a clear correlation between those customers and the households covered by 15 of the 60 main PRiZM categories. “This provided us with a good ‘fingerprint’ for the PRiZM categories we were looking for”, Martin Greenhalgh says, “so we were then able to apply the same criteria to other parts of the country.”
That analysis revealed the Sunderland area of the North East as a particularly promising territory (no fewer than 50 per cent of households met the required criteria), so the company opened its first regional base there. It quickly proved a success, so within 18 months the company repeated the process, and this time homed in on the Rotherham area of South Yorkshire.
That base too proved profitable quickly, so on an accelerating timescale the company then opened further bases at Coleshill (Birmingham) and Warrington (Lancashire). All of them have lived up to expectation.
Whilst the original PRiZM dataset was supplied at postcode sector level, more recently the company has been using data at full unit postcode level, which provides a much more detailed picture of target neighbourhoods. “This has helped us manage our direct sales force more effectively by identifying the exact streets offering best market potential.”
The company has a 100-strong direct sales force, who represent one of its most successful means of winning new business.
Two other products have been supplied to Buy As You View by Kingswood MapMechanics – the GeoConcept geographic information system, and a Microsoft Access database. Currently GeoConcept is used mainly to present graphical map displays of the areas identified by PRiZM as potential targets.
“Later we might use GeoConcept for analytical purposes as well,” Martin Greenhalgh says. “But initially, with my background in IT, I’ve been able to do the data processing with Access, and also with our own Oracle database.” The Oracle system runs on clustered Unix servers.
Up to now, Buy As You View’s additional regional bases have all included stockholding facilities, delivery vehicles, sales staff and a servicing capability, “but now that we have a good spread of bases, we should be able to support further expansion with satellite depots,” Martin Greenhalgh says.
The company has paid particular attention to establishing local resources around the country. High-quality service is a key element of its sale proposition, and it offers next-day delivery on most items – even large products such as furniture. A mobile data system is used to allow field sales staff to check on stock availability on mobile phone-connected Pocket PC computers, running bespoke software written in-house.
“We have an unusually large IT department for our size – fifteen staff, including eight developers,” Martin Greenhalgh says. “We feel this is another of our strengths.”
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