An overview of market analysis: Who?, What?, Where? and Why?

摘要

As marketing has evolved from ‘mass marketing’ to ‘niche marketing’, spatially disaggregated market analyses have become essential for companies to be able to plan both tactically and strategically with regard to customers' needs and competitive threats. The distinctive industry of companies providing geodemographic/market analyses developed in the mid-1970s and is now over £10 million in size. A background to both the distinctive industry and application areas is provided in the first section. In the second section, an introductory description of market analysis is provided, highlighting the current (although changing) single important use of census data and of the postal geography rather than census geography; particular attention is given to so-called ‘geodemographic’ discriminators which classify neighbourhood types, especially the trend towards market-specific, rather than general-purpose, market segmentation tools. A number of different, general application areas, including (marketing) management information systems, branch location analysis, credit scoring, and direct marketing are described in the third section. A future outlook for market analysis is presented in the final section.