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Daytime demographics: Where are your customers?

Where do people spend most of their daytime hours? It’s a question constantly asked by organisations involved in sales, marketing and similar activities; and historically this has been surprisingly difficult to answer. Yet for organisations such as retailers who are reliant on daytime population or passing trade, it is of vital importance.

To analyse daytime trade use:
shopping

Daytime population


Mapped bar charts of Census occupational group

The last full UK Census was taken in 2001, but mid year estimates are made available each year to update some variables. MapMechanics offers a range of products combining information from the three Census Offices: England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Choose between a full pack of 240 variables or a topic pack focused on one aspect such as car ownership or occupational group. For advice regarding which product is best for your project, Contact MapMechanics.

MapMechanics picks up the lead given by the 2001 Census, which for the first time asked where people worked during the day as well as where they lived. MapMechanics has taken the resultant information and attached it meaningfully to individual sections of streets, offering users a much more intuitive basis than the Census data alone for making informed decisions on issues such as the retail potential of an area.

Traffic volumes and passing trade
Businesses can also take their analysis a stage further, using another product just launched by MapMechanics – its traffic density data set. This takes input gathered from 50,000 vehicles in regular daily UK service (and created originally to measure road speeds), and uses spatial aggregation techniques to apply a reliable index of typical traffic volumes to each road segment. Using this and the Daytime Demographics system in combination, you can measure not only the daytime population on a given set of streets, but also the potential passing trade.

Street level analysis

Daytime Demographics data shows daytime population according to the number of employees present in each section of street (usually any stretch of road between junctions or other “nodes”). As standard, the information is shown on NAVTEQ street-level map data.

This means, with suitable GIS software such as GeoConcept, users can apply differential colour coding to sections of streets to show different densities of population in them. This vividly picks out localities that might be completely missed by conventional geodemographics – for instance, where housing is not particularly dense, and where the street grid may be fairly sparse, yet where there is a concentration of modern office or factory developments that employ large numbers of staff.

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