Avoiding mistakes and revealing opportunities

Map analysis is an increasingly important ingredient in the marketing mix – which is why Kingswood MapMechanics is introducing more detail and accuracy to targeting techniques and faster, easier ways to access information – helping organisations avoid expensive mistakes and reveal profitable opportunities.

The latest products from the company, including the new Intranet Intelligence system, go on display on the company’s stand at the Technology for Marketing show (stand no E79), which runs at Olympia, London from the 10 to 11 February 2004.

Mistakes can be avoided by undertaking more detailed and accurate analysis of the market. The detail of Kingswood MapMechanics’ range is seen clearly in its new street-level Census data, which makes it possible to determine the number of people in each Census category within very small catchments – perhaps just a few streets around each fast food outlet or convenience store, or just the area covered by a single leaflet distributor.

This has been achieved by linking the 2001 Census data (measures such as car ownership, for instance) with street networks, showing how many people meeting the chosen criteria are likely to live along specific road links. The objective has been to give users in marketing and related fields a much closer fit of demographic measurements to real-world locations – and thus a much more powerful predictive tool.

This more accurate approach is not confined to census analysis; now new attractiveness values for each street in over 1000 British town centres are also available. This powerful data set enables the user to understand which streets are likely to have the greatest footfall, and so be likely to be the best place to position market researchers, or site new outlets. It has been created by taking account of the number of multiple outlets (for instance John Lewis, Next, Woolworths) along each street, as well as measures such as brand strength and sales density, and then calculating an attractiveness ranking for each street to reveal where the best opportunities lie.

Taking this approach a stage further, Kingswood MapMechanics can now help users work out much more confidently which streets and how many people can be reached in a

given time, or how many live within a precise travel time of a given location. This is done by calculating drive times on the basis of street-level mapping with enhanced road speed data. Real road speeds for different times of day – notably rush-hour, off-peak and night-time – have been attached to each road link. The speeds are captured by traffic measurement specialist ITIS from thousands of readings taken from vehicles tracked daily by means of GPS satellite-based location technology.

Recognising the increasingly international scope of marketing initiatives, Kingswood MapMechanics can now also provide detailed demographic information on a much broader basis. International Neighbourhood profiling from Cameo is now more detailed (at street level in Germany, for instance) and is available for more countries than ever before (even as far afield as Australia).

As map based analysis is now essential to marketing professionals, Kingswood MapMechanics is focusing on making access to maps easier and cheaper than ever before, enabling people in marketing to concentrate on product, place and price rather than on learning how to use new software.

The launch of the brand new Intranet Intelligence product provides an out-of-the-box solution that enables marketing professionals throughout an organisation to share information, undertake ad-hoc queries and map trends to determine where the most profitable new business can be developed, who is most likely to respond to a campaign, or which account manager should deal with which new lead.