Geoneighboring is one of three marketing tasks Archadeck assigns to its GIS. A second is creating broad mailing lists from the demographic profiles of people who've responded to the company's ads in the past. The third is what Schiedel calls "freehanding," identifying communities ripe for development. Essentially it works like this: Schiedel chooses a corner of some untried suburb and feeds its coordinates to GeoWizard, which looks up homeowners' ages and other demographic data and then generates a community profile.
Since adopting its GIS, Archadeck has seen its direct-mail postcard return rates triple. And Schiedel has gained so much statistically substantiated confidence that now he "can 'pummel' a neighborhood," as he puts it. The system has already paid for itself. For a recent 50,000-address mailing, Schiedel asked GeoWizard for names matching the demographic profile and landscape the company was targeting through its own market research. The program turned up 45,000 likely prospects, "saving me $4,000 in mailing lists right there." With net gains like those, Schiedel hasn't hesitated to plow back some of the savings into GeoWizard's latest release. GeoDemX refines Archadeck's campaigns into state-by-state demographic profiles of customers, which Schiedel in turn cross-references against his own field surveys. As GeoWizard becomes increasingly sophisticated, Archadeck's narrowing profiles of prospects will just "get hotter and hotter," sums up Schiedel.
Bill Wood, founder of Wood Personnel Service Inc., turned to a GIS for profiles, not of prospects but of employees. Because of the persistently tight labor market around Nashville, Wood Personnel's product -- labor -- sells itself. A no-brainer, admits Wood, except for one complication: finding the right people in sufficient quantities. To keep his eight-year-old company growing, Wood assembled a profile of the roughly 500 temps he'd already staffed out successfully. His plan: to recruit more workers out of the same demographics (age, education, marital status, and the like).
But where to look for them? For Wood, the answer was a GIS program called Maptitude. The software package, from Caliper Corp., comes with updated U.S. census data that can be transferred onto maps in color-coded demographic zones. Another no-brainer except that computer-novice Wood had no idea how to run a GIS database. So he hired one of his own temps and instructed him to "get the people at Caliper on the phone and have them tell you how to find out where I should be recruiting from."
Answers popped onto the screen in the form of zip-code areas, the category Wood selected "because zip codes were something I felt I could get my hands on." Zip-code areas of a certain color indicated a preponderance of the attributes he wanted to match. He booked help-wanted ads in media that served those zones, rented banquet rooms in local hotels to conduct interviews, and recruited from the pool that showed up. A few months later he studied the campaign's effectiveness. "The software increased our applicant flow 25%," he reports. And revenue flow followed "almost exactly."
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As the range and selection of affordable GIS software have multiplied, so have the scope and complexity of the raw data businesses can tap. Geographic databases are now readily available by direct mail from a variety of sources -- among them, the U.S. Bureau of the Census and municipal tax-assessment departments -- and can easily be adapted to almost all basic GIS software. And more and more software packages come with the data already in place. Caliper, for example, not only compresses all 7 millionÑplus residential and commercial blocks in the nation onto one $195 Block Centroid Data CD but packs 21 demographic variables -- for example, the number of people younger than 18 or older than 65 -- into the leftover space. Other vendors include niceties like contamination sites, the frequency of hailstorms, newspaper circulation zones, "isochrones" (which geographically delineate driving times -- like the time it takes to travel between, say, a neighborhood area and a shopping center), and the traffic flow on one-way streets.
Thanks to that sort of elaborate information, some small businesses are making moves that they probably would never have thought about otherwise. Cropcast, a subsidiary of Earth Satellite Corp., in Rockville, Md., started out as a purveyor of basic crop-management intelligence for farmers -- weather patterns, pest migrations, and the like. As its GIS input became more complex, its forecasts became more profitable. Today the bulk of Cropcast's customers are Wall Street commodity traders. Seattle's Best Coffee Inc. depends on a GIS to choose storefront sites that challenge its competition. Meanwhile, Minneapolis's Geo-span is doing a brisk business selling its City Tours CD-ROM to real estate firms, which use the GIS footage to take house hunters on armchair tours of available properties.
Although most do, GIS coordinates don't have to relate to positions on the planet Earth. A map could just as easily depict the layout of, say, office space. Click on an individual office, and information about the occupant's job, salary, and benefits appears under his or her picture. Click again, and a second view unfolds, this one of maintenance and lease schedules and the depreciated value of the office computer. A GIS could also map the location of specific displays on a retail floor and assess the effectiveness of point-of-sale merchandising. And while they're at it, retailers could pump demographic variables into the mix, reconfiguring floor plans and product promotions in response to the purchasing patterns of a store's clientele.
