Geomarketing consists of mobilizing various techniques for modelling, analyzing and visualizing your data with spatial representations to develop effective business and marketing strategies, based not just on your company data, but also taking external data into account to reflect the realities and specificities – geographic, socio-democratic, economic – of the territories in which your company operates.

The power these techniques offer when combined through cartographic representation can facilitate decision-making as they make visible and intelligible something that is often difficult – perhaps even impossible - to grasp, and above all to objectify, when the same data and statistical series are presented in the standard spreadsheet format. For example, when setting out to show:

• the real catchment area for a store,
• the business potential of an urban area where the company is planning to install a new site,
• the optimum site location for a new point of sale, technical service hub, or depot,
• the different purchasing behaviours of customers according to region and points of sale that are already established,
• the effective coverage of a territory by sales teams or a branch network of offices or stores,
• grid analysis of a territory with respect to competitors,
• priority prospection zones,
• the real effectiveness of marketing means deployed (mailshot distributions, telephone campaigns, advertising displays …)
• the territorial pertinence of marketing segmentations…

Visual display to aid understanding and decision-making

Creating maps to represent a particular facet of your activity or strategy may be an end in itself. But geomarketing is a fully rounded discipline that sets out to analyse and understand so appropriate decisions can be made: decisions that will reconcile strategic objectives with the realities on the ground. From to calculating isochrones, zones of theoretical customer attractiveness,  will bring together all the software tools and functionalities you could possibly need so you can:

• conduct in-depth spatial analyses,
• create multi-criterion simulations,
• compare a variety of different scenarios,
• produce summary reports that are supported and updated with the most recent data available,

This allows you to make informed decisions so the choices you make will be, without doubt, the best possible, whether it is a question of developing your distribution network, targeting your marketing campaigns or mapping out sectors for your sales force.

Berner, LCL, Calicéo: 3 real-life geomarketing scenarios

, one of Europe’s leading distributors of tools and professional equipment has drawn on the expertise offered by GEOCONCEPT’s technical teams since 2001 to maximize business performance. One of the main requirements of this company when they took the step of deploying geomarketing was to overhaul the , and in addition, review and manage their action and prospection plans for sales executives. Before they adopted  solution, their sectorization had been set up manually using pen and paper, with recourse to heterogeneous sources that were difficult to reconcile and to refresh each time it became necessary to incorporate a changing variable. Moving over to digital tools enabled a progressive reorganization of business sectors (by product range, service type, etc) and simplified the maintenance and optimization of these sector breakdowns as the activity grew and developed.

As a follow-on to this transformation, Berner based its strategic planning on  to make the information and analysis functions accessible to all of its national and regional managers and partners. The third step was to adopt the route scheduling and in the GEOCONCEPT range to enable the 1,000-strong salesforce to maximise their presence on the ground with regard to visibility and availability to customers, while reducing their travel (and their !). Having integrated GEOCONCEPT tools at the heart of their information system, and developed their own geomarketing central function, Berner recently incorporated GEOCONCEPT’s isochrone and isodistance zone calculation functions within the system to determine the ideal siting for its first «shop» in the Lyon area (France), based on the localisation of its customers and prospects.

, a major retail banking player in France with a network of 1,700 branch offices, have long been devotees of geomarketing and geodecisional technology. In 2015, in the context of a project to consolidate its CRM tools, the bank decided to integrate these competencies within its Customer Data and Knowledge management services. GEOCONCEPT was selected in the framework of a tender for the capacity of its teams and its technology to respond to the needs of LCL in the supply of  and cartographic production, statistical indicators and geomarketing reports, all linked into its CRM and decisional system.

The geomarketing team uses  to produce indicators, sector information and thematic maps, which are in turn made available to end users in their central offices and over the network via several web portals. Making these data and geomarketing tools available via these portals enables different teams to operate autonomously in their analytical operations. Geoconcept technology can therefore be used as and when required by the Human Resources management team to produce staff travel plans; by the marketing departments to strengthen the relevance of the company’s campaign targeting; by the network to optimize territorial breakdown through the study of best locations for branch offices, strategically useful affiliations for branch offices, and the best opening hours to suit specific customer profiles.

The balneotherapy group Calicéo called upon GEOCONCEPT’s geomarketing expertise to develop its network of aquatic fitness centres. In 2018, as part of its growth strategy, the company commissioned a GEOCONCEPT study aiming to identify zones with the highest potential for the installation of 5 new centres between now and 2023.

An in-depth analysis of Calicéo’s clientele, based on the customer file and satisfaction questionnaire, enabled them to define the prevailing customer profile of those frequenting existing centres, and to isolate variables and weightings to store and use for the geomarketing analysis itself.

Drawing on the socio-demographic data published by INSEE, and data from the company Parabellum on French spending patterns on beauty products and physical fitness, and with reference to Calicéo’s customer data and satisfaction surveys, GEOCONCEPT built a scoring model that allowed them to evaluate the potential of 2,000 zones in six French urban areas. A deatiled segmentation of the competition was also integrated within the model.

All the tools you would normally need for a typical geomarketing exercise have been deployed within , so using one application you can know and hierarchize success factors for existing centres, identify where customers are coming from geographically, provide a material imprint and shape to the catchment zone, measure the attractiveness of centres and model their catchment areas.

As Marc Léonard, CEO of Calicéo, explains:

«The conclusions of the geomarketing study led by GEOCONCEPT have revealed significant regional variations in our customer base, in terms of socio-professional categories, average customer age, frequentation rhythm or again the average spend per customer visit. These scoring data are extremely valuable to us as they facilitate our fundamental research and help us to make informed decisions as we develop and grow».