That's about as bare bones as GISs get, but it did the trick for Walsh. The maps gave him "something extra" that he wouldn't have come up with otherwise: dramatic, visual proof that many of his clients were running ineffective operations. One distributor of high-end garden implements, for example, had saturated the market in certain affluent areas while barely establishing a presence in others. Armed with his geocoded profile of the distributor's blotchy sales territory, Walsh met with the CEO and put it to him bluntly: "This is a perspective of your business. Is there some reason you're overlapping in these dense territories and not covering these others at all? More penetration in concentrated areas is expensive. Everyone's seeing your product everywhere; it's cannibalizing itself."
The CEO was impressed. And Walsh had secured himself a major trouble-shooting project. Here again the system worked to his advantage. To develop a sharper picture of the most promising territories, Walsh took out space ads for the distributor's product line in the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker. Then he cataloged the places where responses came from and matched them against areas the dealer wasn't serving. From there it was quick GIS work to set up dealerships in areas with the right population mix.
Using a GIS as a standard part of its consulting service has enhanced Market Results' own market results considerably, says Walsh, who has gone on to higher-priced software and greater challenges. In its latest project, Market Results is plotting the most efficient routes for a client's salespeople to follow when they call on present and potential customers. Soon they'll be able to turn on their laptops and look at a representation of the landmarks they should be seeing out the window. No more getting lost and blowing an afternoon.
Craig Heard knows a thing or two about landmarks, and he's big on GISs, too. In 1991 the president of $16-million Gateway Outdoor Advertising Inc., in Somerset, N.J., was among the first in his field to use a system to find the best places to put up specific ads. Today all 7,000 of the firm's billboard sites are geocoded. To target the best locations for ads for a retailer of children's athletic shoes, for example, the computer is asked for the proximity of potential sites to schools and playgrounds. For tobacco or alcohol advertisers -- wary of community opposition -- Gateway's maps zoom in on sites at a respectable distance from churches, schools, and hospitals.
New and improved geocoding helped Gateway earn record revenues in 1995, even as the company was adapting to changing times. Commissions from smoke and drink ads -- once the bread and butter of the billboard industry -- have dropped sharply in recent years, says vice-president of marketing June Petroff, and Gateway has had to vigorously diversify its customer base. "The mapping system allowed us to do that by showing advertisers how well we can target their market," she notes. To further its move into public-transport advertising, for example, Gateway uses GIS graphics produced by MapInfo software to superimpose billboard and sign locations onto bus routes. "That convinces a customer that we can blanket the landscape with its message," Petroff explains. "It's much more compelling visually than the alternative -- laying a plastic sheet over a transit map."
The new generation of GIS software has also worked wonders for Archadeck, headquartered in Richmond, Va., a fast-growing $25-million home-add-on franchiser with nearly 80 offices in 24 states. In 1994 the company began managing its direct-contact marketing campaigns with GeoWizard, a GIS "prospect-finder" produced by GeoDemX Corp. Before, says director of marketing Shannon Schiedel, Archadeck would try to drum up business the old-fashioned way -- hanging brochures on doors, putting up placards at construction sites, even making cold calls on homes that looked as if they could use work. Now Schiedel logs up to 120 new projects a week into a GIS database, draws a circle with a two-tenths-of-a-mile radius around each one, and "asks" GeoWizard to pull out the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the surrounding homeowners.
Once he's fixed his coordinates, with a list of prospects in hand, Schiedel sets to work on a direct-contact campaign, using a method he calls "geoneighboring." Before construction on a project gets under way, a number of "high-profile, highly probable prospects" in the immediate vicinity are sent a soft-sell notice encouraging them to give Archadeck a call if there's too much noise. A second postcard sent shortly after construction begins is more suggestive: We're adding a new deck to 100 Chestnut Street, a couple of doors down. Why not come over and have a look?
With established mapping "engines" like ArcView, from Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), and MapInfo Professional at their programmable core (relatively comprehensible developer's kits are offered with several desktop programs), value-added resellers like GeoDemX often honor individual requests for modifications. For Schiedel's geoneighboring program, GeoDemX outfitted GeoWizard so that Archadeck could line up addresses by absolute-value distance away from a central project, sorting them by mileage. A prospect's proximity has proved so critical to Archadeck's direct-contact sales that even in a dense community, where the two-tenths-of-a-mile limit could encompass 50 or more homes, Schiedel might opt to pursue only the closest 10.
