Companies increasingly recognize the advantages of geographic analyses and their contributions to successful business planning. Postcode maps play a particularly important role in this regard. Good maps bring greater transparency and confidence to sales, marketing and controlling endeavors.

Maps point the way to success

"Geomarketing" has many names and faces including "business mapping" and "geographic market analysis" to name but a couple. Using a software application to carry out regional analyses that evaluate and visualize the place-based component of data on digital maps is now a common business practice around the world.

Internationally active companies are particularly aware of the merits of a geographic analysis of their data and the resulting valuable insights. Applications of geomarketing range from the visualization of customer locations and definition of catchment areas to the evaluation of regional turnover shares and identification and precise localization of unexploited market potential. Put simply, companies achieve greater efficiency and harness new turnover potential by carrying out regional evaluations of company activities in sales and marketing.

"Maps integrated into a geomarketing software comprise one of the most important tools for meeting the needs of today's sales, marketing and controlling divisions," explains Wolfram Scholz, managing director of GfK GeoMarketing. "This is especially true of internationally active companies."

Postcodes are the linchpins of most geomarketing analyses, because they link company data with maps. Addresses constitute the majority of company data, and almost every address contains a postcode.

This is the reason that detailed, precise and up-to-date postcode maps are so valuable to internationally active companies. Businesses are increasingly aware of the importance of working with high-quality maps, as these are the foundation of all spatial analyses.

Postcode maps serve as common international currency

Postcode maps are especially important in an international business context. As almost all company data already contains postcode information, it makes sense to use postcode maps to visualize regional data trends and relationships. In contrast to place names, postcodes offer a straightforward, unambiguous means of associating data with maps. Moreover, almost all countries in the world have a postal system. Most postcodes are numberbased, although some use a combination of letters and numbers. Postcodes thus offer an unambiguous means of coding place-based information and can be directly linked with high-quality, vector-based digital maps via the (alpha-)numeric code.

What makes a good postcode map?

The production of precise, up-to-date and gapless postcode maps requires significant expertise and effort. To
create accurate postcode maps of a given country, map producers must consult with official bureaus of statistics, post offices, government agencies, other map providers and NGOs*. GfK GeoMarketing's in-house cartography division uses this information to create detailed postcode maps. These maps are then crosschecked against satellite/aerial images.

One of the greatest challenges faced by map suppliers is comprehensively digitizing all postal boundaries in a given country. Every single postcode must be precisely rendered and the boundaries of all postcodes must fit together without gaps or overlaps. Visualizing postal boundaries is particularly demanding, because only a few countries in the world have official postcode maps. As a result, cartographers must painstakingly research and then manually digitize these boundaries. Cartographers therefore often play the role of detectives as they piece together and compare various sources in order to accurately digitize the postal boundaries. It's also essential that these boundaries form an enclosed geography without gaps or overlaps. This applies both to boundaries within a given country as well as those in neighboring countries.

Only maps that meet these quality standards are suitable for geomarketing purposes such as sales territory planning and analyzing regional turnover.

Maps quickly go out-of-date due to regional forms

Even maps that fulfill these standards must be regularly updated in order to ensure the accuracy of any analyses carried out with them: "An out-of-date cartographic basis leads to many problems and even outright errors," warns Klaus Dittmann, head of cartography at GfK GeoMarketing. "For example, an accurate analysis or optimization of a transport network requires up-to-date maps. Outdated map sources - such as those that don't reflect the many thousands of boundary changes implemented every year in Europe by the respective national postal services - can mean that data is incorrectly associated with the maps. In some cases, data can even be lost if the regions in question no longer exist." Given these requirements, GfK GeoMarketing regularly updates all postcode and administrative maps in order to ensure that they depict the latest boundaries.

Due to the expertise and effort required to carry out these regular updates, there is often a lack of good maps on the market for some countries, including - or especially - dynamic markets such as Asia. Companies active in these markets can benefit from GfK GeoMarketing's detailed postcode maps, which, in the case of Europe, are updated annually.

Maps are the backbone of spatial analyses

Although the production and updating of postcode maps is laborious for map suppliers, implementing these maps into company operations couldn't be easier. Using a good geomarketing software like RegioGraph, users can import and analyze their company data on the maps in just a few clicks.

GfK GeoMarketing has a very attractive range of offerings for companies interested in taking a geomarketing approach: We offer very competitive prices and licensing models for all needs, be it for a small or large number of users, an individual country, continent or the entire world and for all standard mapping and BI systems. Irrespective of the business division or area of the world concerned, our maps offer a reliable basis for planning and extracting more insights from your data.

Specialty maps

In addition to postcode and administrative maps, we also offer numerous specialty maps, including maps for the reinsurance (CRESTA) and pharmaceutical industries as well as topographic maps.

Our maps are available in all common data formats and meet the highest quality standards:

• gapless and overlap-free
• vector-based for infinite zoom
• based on geographic coordinates (WGS 84)
• fully attributed with international and local place names
• crosschecked against the latest satellite imagery
• seamless fit with GfK GeoMarketing's market and purchasing power data
• informed by many years of experience and expertise
• regularly updated and expanded

New 2011 map updates

• Europe
• USA/Canada
• Africa
• Mexico
• Australia/New Zealand
• Russia
• World

Free samples available at www.gfk-geomarketing.com/map_samples

We'd be happy to assist you!

Doris Steffen
Tel. +49 (0)7251 9295180
d.steffen(at)gfk-geomarketing.com