Market Analysis: GIS and Data for Predicting Turnover

Predicting turnover is an essential part of planning and budgeting for retailers, financial institutions, fast food outlets, leisure and other commercial organisations.

Turnover predictions can be simply based on previous turnover figures and off the shelf expenditure data for each outlet's catchment. Alternatively a more sophisticated gravity model can be used, allocating expenditure to each outlet according to the relative attractiveness of the outlet and a measure of the likelihood of customers choosing that outlet given the distance / time they have to travel.

Although each organisation uses a different approach to turnover prediction, most models need information about some or all of the following:

• Where customers can choose to spend their money (your own outlet and competitor locations)
• The amount of money they are likely to spend (expenditure data)
• The lifestyle/profile of potential customers
• The attractiveness of the outlets (e.g. floor space, drawing power of each retail centre)
• The extent of the catchment for each outlet
• How far customers will have to travel (drive-times)
• A unit of geography on which to make calculations and present results (boundary data)

GeoConcept offers a sophisticated range of advanced techniques for calculating routes, drive-time boundaries and matrices (time between each outlet and each expenditure origin for example). The software also incorporates formula functions and extensive thematic mapping options in the standard product. And importantly, the system is exceptionally easy to link to external databases, so you can bring together data from a range of internal and external sources and can feed journey time results into external models interactively.