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Retail Consultancy

Retail Consultancy Solutions


At GMAP Consulting we have worked with retailers across all retail sectors for over 20 years helping them to maximise their sales and profitability by resolving a whole range of 'locational' issues. In addition to our MICROVISION software solutions and data sets that help you tackle these types of issues in-house we can also help you address each of these questions, and more,
on a consultancy project basis. Questions we can help you answer include:

Customer Questions- 'Who?' :
  • Who are our customers and what do they look like?
  • How far or how long do our customers typically travel?
  • What are the geodemographic profiles of our markets?
  • Who should we be targeting with our local marketing?
  • Where can we find these potential new customers?
  • Which media channels should we be using to promote each site?
  • How should we plan our staffing to best suit our market?
Site Location Questions- 'Where?' :
  • How can we define and optimise our retail catchments or territories?
  • What sales and market share should new and current sites achieve?
  • How well are each of our sites performing against their potential?
  • Where are our competitors located and what is their impact on us?
  • Which high street, retail centre or park should we locate in next?
  • Within those areas, where are the highest levels of footfall?
  • How would a site opening, refurbishment or closure impact our sales?
  • Where could we rationalise our network if we needed to?
  • What is the optimum amount of stores or sites for our network?
Product Questions - 'What?' :
  • What sales should we be achieving by product?
  • Which products are under or over-performing?
  • Where is the highest demand for our products?
  • What should we stock to best meet demand?
  • What levels of each product should we be stocking?
  • Which products can we cross-sell to our market?
Market Definition & Trade Draw Analysis:

Understanding their marketplace and where their sales come from is in many cases the primary requirement for most retailers. At GMAP we can help you define and map out your retail catchment using advanced drivetime and distance profiling technologies to analyse how far or for how long your customers typically travel and where they are coming from.

Territory Planning & Optimisation:

For those organisations that have sales territories rather than stores or outlets, we can help you develop the optimum territory definition to achieve the best sales coverage whilst also identifying potential gaps in the marketplace. We can make the sizes of your sales areas equal and define their boundaries by distributing the populations and levels of demand for your products equally between them and minimising the drivetimes or distances required for each salesperson to travel. Such analysis can seek to either identify areas of territory overlap or eliminate overlaps altogether.

Market Insight & Analysis:

Census data and our consumer classifications can be used to understand the geodemographic and socio-economic makeup of your markets, both in terms of where your customers live and where they are likely to be during the working day.

We can also help you understand future changes in population growth across your market using our population projections. Combine this intelligence with information about the competitors located close to you and the other retail outlets in close proximity and you can start to develop an accurate picture of your marketplace.

 

Site Selection & Network Planning:

We can provide market representation plans that help you understand the overall size and layout of your current retail network and our wide-ranging retail datasets, software solutions and modelling expertise can help you identify the ‘optimum’ network size based on the demand for your products and services and the location of your competitors. These technologies also enable us to identify the optimum location for your next store or outlet, pinpointed to the right centre and the specific postcode.

 

Sales & Market Share Analysis:

If you have sales data for each of your individual sites or sales territories then we can help you visualise your sales within each region, breaking sales down by product area if the data allows it. We can really start to help you to gain an insight into your national market share and local market penetration within each retail catchment or sales territory by developing household expenditure estimates for each of your products and services using data from a wide range of market research panels. By combining these estimates of demand with your actual sales data we can help you appreciate the size and potential of your markets and your performance within them. This gives you the intelligence you need to plan with confidence both your location planning strategy and your local marketing initiatives.

Sales Performance Benchmarking & Management:

We can also help you benchmark your sales, identifying your best and worst performing sites and more importantly explaining why they differ and how they can be improved. We can provide a metrics analysis of each site, which rates and compares everything from the square footage, car-parking spaces, number of counters, tills and sales staff through to the products stocked and the proximity of competitor locations or anchor stores. By benchmarking each site against your best, we can help you identify the critical success factors that can be focussed upon to either recover the worst sites or find better locations for them. We can help you evaluate site attractiveness and set realistic sales forecasts and targets for each site, and where new stores are planned we can predict the potential revenues and market share achievable.

Strategic Network Planning & Scenario Modelling:

When you are looking at strategic programmes of network expansion, refurbishment, rationalisation, or consolidation, say in a mergers and acquisition process, it is vital that you get your locational decisions right as most will involve considerable investment or divestment. We can help you model different scenarios and understand the financial impacts; whether it be how much a new or refurbished store will make, what impact it will have on your other stores, what impact a competitor opening will have or what impact a series of closures will have across your whole network. In a merger situation we can help you analyse which outlets should be closed and which should be retained to provide the best returns.

Customer Segmentation & Profiling:

Understanding your customers is an essential part of your retail strategy. If you have the address for each of your customers you do this with ease. You can quickly develop a multi-dimensional profile of your customers illustrating their geodemographics, income levels, credit risk, financial sophistication, property price and economic activity. Should your customer data be inaccurate or out-of-date our sister company EuroDirect can help you clean your database and embellish it with the CAMEO attributes to help improve your customer communications.

EuroDirects CAMEO Classifications are available for the UK and over 30 key markets throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australasia, helping you to analyse your global customers just as easily as those in the UK.

Prospect Targeting & Media Planning:

To support your network planning or territory planning strategy, GMAP’s sister company EuroDirect can help you focus your customer recruitment, up-sell and cross-sell efforts much more accurately with their wealth of prospect data and analytical expertise. As experts in the field of direct marketing, they can help you identify ‘look-a-like’ prospects to develop accurately targeted direct mail and leaflet drops around your stores or within your sales areas. Access to their comprehensive media data also allows you to ensure you maximise your use of above-the-line advertising across TV, radio, paid-for or freesheet newspaper media within your markets.

Store / Outlet Optimisation:

Once you have a thorough insight into your market, we can help you to utilise this consumer intelligence to optimise a whole range of operational issues throughout your business. By understanding the local market profiles of each store catchment or territory we can ensure that your product proposition is ideally matched to your audience. This can have benefits in many areas; from ensuring that your stock ranging, promotions and sales channels are conducive to the target market through to making your store environment and even your staff selection and placement appropriate.

Store Segmentation:

By adding your store and sales data to the equation, GMAP can classify your stores into segments, whereby the stores in each store segment show similarities with each other, both in terms of their catchment and site characteristics. This type of analysis can help you in the management of both your network planning and marketing strategy by enabling you to manage groups of analogous stores in exactly the same way.

Product Performance & Brand Contribution Analysis:

Appreciating how your individual products and brands perform across your stores and territories and how they contribute to your overall sales and profitability is something which retailers are becoming more and more interested in. Using your sales data, split by product group or brand, GMAP can help you visualise your product performance and identify which products or brands are having a significant impact on the sales in each retail catchment and which are not proving to be as successful.

Market Entry Analysis, Evaluation & Planning:

If you are looking to expand into new product areas, new overseas markets or new sales channels, then we can help you assess the current marketplace and help you identify areas of growth opportunity.

We have a wide range of industry specific datasets, market research data and global consumer classifications as well as a wealth of cross-market expertise that can help you implement your diversification plans whatever they may be.