Target marketing : the geographical information systems approach

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:Geodemographics has been used extensively as a decision-support tool in both the business sectorand the market survey environment in the United States, the United Kingdom and numerous othercountries. This has however not been the case in South Africa, partly because of the expenseinvolved in capturing current and complete customer information. As an alternative to capturing allthe required customer information, geodemographics has frequently made use of governmentcensus data to supplement the organisation-specific data. However, even the census data has itsshortcomings.This research has explored a method for building an organisation-specific database using acombination of government census data and organisation-specific data. The organisation-specificdata was captured using a questionnaire that was targeted to a specific group of people. Theinformation obtained from the questionnaire and which overlapped with specific census datavariables was then used to update the relevant census variables.Cluster analysis was subsequently conducted on the census data in order to identify enumeratorareas within the Western Province that had demographic and economic characteristics similar tothose of the surveyed areas. Once the appropriate enumerator areas had been identified, theorganisation-specific information from the survey was extrapolated to these new areas outside ofthe surveyed areas.The methodology used in this research provides a process that allows organisations to build aunique geodatabase by making use of the good qualities of both the census data and user-specificdata. The resulting geodatabase is one that contains current and pertinent information while alsoproviding complete spatial coverage.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University