Understanding the geography of business and markets is crucial for creating competitive advantages, marketing with results, and making strategic decisions. ArcGIS Business Analyst is the premier suite of tools for unlocking the intelligence of geography, demographics, consumer lifestyle, and business data, making it a valuable asset for business decision making such as analyzing market share and competition, determining new site expansions and reductions, or targeting ideal new customers.

Overview

The ability to analyze the geographical component of business data reveals trends, patterns, and opportunities hidden in tabular data. By combining information, such as sales data, demographics, and competitor locations, with geographic data, such as census boundaries, territories, or store locations, ArcGIS Business Analyst helps you better understand your market, your customers, and your competition.

ArcGIS Business Analyst combines ESRI's leading GIS technology with extensive business, demographic, and consumer household data to assist users with mission-critical decisions such as analyzing the market and competition, finding the ideal site for a new business location, or targeting direct mail. ArcGIS Business Analyst lets users perform sophisticated business analysis in one easy-to-use application.

ArcGIS Business Analyst lets you:

• Perform customer or store prospecting.
• Define customer-based or store trade areas.
• Find a location similar to that of your best store.
• Conduct market penetration analysis.
• Create gravity models.
• Perform drive-time analysis over a nationwide street network.
• Integrate data and geography from the Web.

Improved Analysis for Any Industry

ArcGIS Business Analyst is a powerful and flexible addition to departmental and organizational decision making. ArcGIS Business Analyst technology has been deployed in a wide range of industries.

ArcGIS Business Analyst uses your customer data to define your stores' trade areas and analyze the corresponding markets. The results of this analysis provide a foundation for implementing marketing programs, siting a new facility, conducting a performance evaluation of a location, identifying where the competition is in comparison to your customers, and more. You can calculate market penetration, locate untapped market areas, and discover store cannibalization problems within your trade areas.

ArcGIS Business Analyst lets you perform the following types of customer market analysis:

• Simple and complex market area boundaries drawn around sets of customers based on customer counts or customer sales
• Desire lines drawn between customers and their assigned stores to identify market pull
• Market penetration calculated based on the number of customers within an area compared to the total population
• New store siting by finding the center of a group of customers

Customer Profiling and Prospecting

Identify and target your best customers.

Analyzing customer demographics and geography enables organizations to locate areas with ideal demographic characteristics for targeting new customers. ArcGIS Business Analyst lets you create profiles of your most profitable customers and identify untapped areas matching these characteristics. ArcGIS Business Analyst gives you direct access via the Internet to Hyphos360, Inc., where you can perform customer profiling and prospecting against a national household-level database from Experian. For the geographic area of interest, you can use demographic and household criteria to obtain unlimited counts for individual ZIP Codes or census geographies. You can order mailing lists for these counts by geography directly from Hyphos360, Inc.

You can use the customer prospecting tools in ArcGIS Business Analyst to:

• Target your marketing campaigns.
• Profile your customers to find more like them.
• Conduct queries based on demographic or household data.

Store Market Analysis

Find the best location for your store using your data and demographic data.

ArcGIS Business Analyst lets organizations analyze their geographic markets and those of competitors. Through the use of gravity modeling and consumer data, users are able to calculate how markets will change as competition and consumer spending change. The ability to understand your competition gives you a distinct advantage in strategic planning and winning new customers.

ArcGIS Business Analyst lets you define the following types of trade areas around your store:

• Simple ring - created around your stores using a radius you specify
• Data-driven ring - created around your stores using a radius proportional to a store characteristic such as total sales, square footage, and gross leasable area (GLA)
• Equal competition - creates trade area boundaries halfway between each store and its neighboring stores (Thiessen polygons)
• Drive time - defines areas accessible along the street network based on your specified maximum travel time or distance
• Gravity model - predicts the sales potential of an area based on distance, competition, attractiveness factors, and consumer spending
• Threshold ring - creates rings containing a specified population or household count

Store Prospecting

Find the most profitable store location based on distance or travel time.

Site selection tools enable you to search for the best store sites for your business. You can summarize the underlying demographics around possible new locations for comparison and analysis. Sites are selected by analyzing single or multiple locations.

Store prospecting allows you to evaluate a potential store location based on distance or travel time. You can specify the distance or travel time based on your experience at other stores in similar market areas.

You can use the ArcGIS Business Analyst store prospecting tools to:

• Locate a potential store site
• Analyze surrounding competition
• Analyze the demographics of the area
• Assess the market potential around the new site
• Perform drive-time analysis around the site

Product Components

Leading Technology and Data in a Comprehensive Package

ArcGIS Business Analyst includes an extensive library of data from industry-leading data providers as well as the power of ArcGIS, a popular and complete GIS, giving you an easy-to-use solution for research, marketing, and analysis.

Demographic Data
(Choose one of the two options, or upgrade and get both)

• ESRI Business Information Solutions (ESRI BIS) offers more than 1,000 variables, including 2003 estimates and 2008 projections, along with 2003 estimates for employee population; population by occupation/industry; disposable income; consumer expenditures by state, county, ZIP Code, tract, and block group level; and, at the census tract level, ACORN market segmentation data.

- OR -

• Applied Geographic Solutions, Inc. (AGS), offers more than 800 variables, including current-year estimates and five projections on demographic attributes, along with current-year estimates for daytime population by occupation; disposable income; climate data; crime indexes; and consumer expenditures by state, county, ZIP Code, tract, and block group level.

Business Data
A national database of more than 12 million U.S. businesses from infoUSA, Inc., which can be used to identify customers or competitors and includes data by industry, sales volume, employees, geography, and more.

Shopping Center Data
The National Research Bureau tracks the following information on nearly 14,000 shopping centers with more than 100,000 square feet of gross leasable area (GLA) across the United States: alphabetical listing, center name, metropolitan statistical area (MSA), city, county, market positioning strategy, space availability, planned/proposed/new centers, expanding/renovating centers, major owner, leasing agent, and management.

Experian Household Consumer File
Current-year national consumer database of more than 105 million households with more than 28 household attributes including age, gender, and income. For customer prospecting and market penetration analysis, Hyphos360, Inc., uses Experian consumer data to provide household counts and mailing lists based on the criteria defined in ArcGIS Business Analyst.

Street Information
Nationwide street database in ArcGIS StreetMap USA from Geographic Data Technology, Inc. (GDT). This street database enhances TIGER 2000 source data and provides a nationwide basemap for routing and drive time analysis.

Product Components: Software

• ArcView 8.3 - the world's leading desktop GIS
• ArcGIS StreetMap USA - street mapping and address matching for the entire United States
• Centrus Geocoder from Sagent Technology, Inc. - for accurate address standardization and batch geocoding
• Crystal Decisions' Crystal Reports 9.0 - includes Web reports and integration with Microsoft Office
  

Availability

ArcGIS Business Analyst is available for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP (Home Edition and Professional). ArcGIS Business Analyst comes with ArcView, but it can be used with ArcInfo or ArcEditor as well.