For the past 19 years, RegioGraph has been delivering successful solutions for the full range of geographic challenges and tasks that face the retail sector. Readers of the handelsjournal recognized this achievement by voting RegioGraph top of the pack in the "Top Retail Product of 2010" competition.

"The use of RegioGraph is now as common in many companies as MS Excel," explains Doris Hardt-Beischl, head of sales at GfK GeoMarketing. "Our many users in the retail sector - from heads of sales and marketing to expansion planners, controllers and managers - continue to confirm that RegioGraph plays a decisive role in their success by bringing efficiency and transparency to their regional markets. We're delighted that readers of the handelsjournal clearly appreciate the value of geomarketing solutions such as software and regional market data."

Hardt-Beischl easily identifies the five most common applications of RegioGraph in retail companies. For example, a natural cosmetics* supplier had to completely restructure his external sales force network. The company sold its products through Germany's approximately 15,000 drugstores. While the sale and distribution of products is handled by the drugstores' retail headquarters, external sales force members and independent retail representatives visit the sales locations to attend to duties related to advertising, product presentation and employee training. The company used RegioGraph for the first time in the late 1990s to plan its sales territories. This resulted in a structure optimized according to workload and accessibility, as well as savings that ran into the double percentage digits! Ever since, the company regularly optimizes its sales territories and makes adjustments based on changing market conditions.
 

When it comes to expansion planning, Hardt-Beischl also doesn't need long to come up with numerous examples of companies that rely on RegioGraph Analysis to expand their operations. A good case in point is a clothing chain. In evaluating new locations, the company needed to take into account on-site factors as well as important prerequisites with regard to the catchment area. In a matter of seconds, RegioGraph calculated the clothing-relating retail purchasing power within a specified radius of a given sales location. The company then used its benchmarks to identify the most promising locations. RegioGraph's speed and reliability are decisive when it comes to selecting optimal locations. Meanwhile, the company has already opened branches in multiple neighboring countries, including Poland and the Czech Republic. RegioGraph also played a pivotal role in these successful expansions abroad."Beyond the obvious locations such as Warsaw and Prague, we were able to identify a range of promising cities and neighborhoods that were previously not part of the picture for us," explains the company employee responsible for the expansion operations.

Geographic-oriented advertising planning is another bread-and-butter task for RegioGraph. Every company faces the challenge of implementing limited advertising resources in the most effective way possible. Here Hardt-Beischl recalls a furniture shop that planned its advertising campaign using RegioGraph: The business wanted to distribute 300,000 mailings within a catchment area of 45 driving minutes. As the catchment area contained far more households than this number, the company had to identify those cities and neighborhoods where the mailings would generate the greatest response. They approached this challenge by visualizing two data sources on a digital map: The company's own turnover data by postcode as well as the GfK Demographics dataset, also provided at the level of postcodes. The company used this information to determine where the most potential customers resided. Using RegioGraph, they were able to pinpoint the most promising postcodes where their mailings would reach genuinely interested customers.

Analyzing a branch network is a complex undertaking in which a large number of factors govern the successful evaluation of locations. Hardt-Beischl tells of a magazine retailer who had to consolidate his branch network throughout Germany without damaging his market and brand presence. The first step involved visualizing the approximately 600 branch locations in RegioGraph and then subdividing them into various location types using a contextual analysis. This typology was necessary, because magazine shops are structured in a wide variety of ways. In the case of locations near transportation hubs (train stations), the magazine retailer had to reckon with an entirely different catchment area and turnover expectation com-pared to a magazine shop integrated into a neighborhood store. Using this typology, he set realistic benchmarks for all branch locations that then served as the basis for the creation of a sustainable branch network structure.

The latest generation of RegioGraph gives users the ability to carry out microgeographic analyses. This feature has a wide range of applications. For example, neighborhood grocery providers can make use of this function to organize the product lines of their branch locations. Each store's product selection can be adjusted according to the demographic profile of the residents in the surrounding streets. "While our standing product line tends to be very similar across areas with very different demographic profiles, there are significant differences in the stocking and structuring of our discount areas and cash register aisles," explains RegioGraph user and head of marketing of a large Germany-based convenience store chain. "These differences play a big role, because we generate a substantial portion of our profit from these areas of the store."
These and many other RegioGraph success stories are closely linked to the growing use of geomarketing in the retail sector. "RegioGraph's winning of the 'Top Retail Product of 2010' prize is a timely signal of the widespread recognition of the importance of geomarketing," says Hardt-Beischl. Nineteen years after its arrival on the market, RegioGraph continues to be retailers' software of choice for the geographic management of their operations and markets. "Geographic-oriented market management is a matter of course for many of today's large companies!"