Market Analysis: Catchments and Store Location Analysis

Catchments based on drive times

Defining the market catchment for your store or outlet is a key step in any market analysis whether you are aiming to optimise the location or marketing plan for retail stores, delivery depots, leisure facilities or police custody suites. Each organisation has a preferred approach, two examples are given here as an illustration of how map based catchment analysis can inform site-location & market planning.

Market Penetration Envelopes

Creating catchments to enclose areas of greatest penetration is an established technique that enables you to identify a catchment as the core areas in which you currently have the highest market penetration (e.g. number of customers compared with the underlying population). The MM Penetration Catchment Generator locates the areas where your market penetration is highest and ranks by penetration. The top areas are then selected until the accumulated total number of customers enclosed reaches your specified percentage of customers (e.g. choosing 80% would exclude 20% of your customer base from the poorest performing areas). This provides a compact realistic catchment that can then be profiled or correlated with drive times so that you can then analyse and compare with new areas where you do not yet have customers / stores / resources. You may use these catchments to identify the size of drive time that is typical for your customer base or your business may already have established catchment sizes.

Drive-time (Isochrone) Catchments for location planning

Some organisations use standard drive-time catchments across their whole network to compare potential locations and monitor performance. A Supermarket might analyse a range of zones around their stores, perhaps 15, 20 and 35 minute catchments and a large high profile branded furniture store may consider 2 hour catchments. Income, expenditure and profiles of the population within these isochrones can then be calculated to contribute to site location information and turnover prediction analysis. More sophisticated analysis also divides the drive time catchment according to population characteristics so each type of community is separately modelled. For market and site location analysis the drive time system needs to be able to:

• Create multiple drive-time catchments around many sites in one batch
• Automatically name the catchments as they are created
• Automatically sum numerical attributes within the catchments as they are made
• Allow user control of inclusion / exclusion holes and islands
• Allow user control of buffer size to ensure clarity where isochrones have a common border (e.g. at the coast)
• Allow user control of smoothing factor - for detailed analysis intricate isochrones required (for clarity of presentation less detailed outlines beneficial).
• Take account of banned turns, one way streets etc
• Allow user to set direction of travel
• Work with data at road or street level for any country
• Use rea liable speeds
• Include network editing functionality so the proposed by-pass / new approach road can be modelled
• Easy tools to combine, divide and adjust generated drive time catchments

GeoConcept Smart Routing offers all these features and is the routing engine in both GeoConcept Enterprise and GeoXploit. GeoConcept Smart Routing is used by retailers, banks and logistics organisations to provide reliable, detailed catchments taking account of genuine recorded journey-times at different times of day. Find out more about drive times, different data sets available and how they can be used.