Identifying the relationship between area characteristics by social class and bank branches distribution using GIS - A case study of Tokyo 23 Wards  Young Joo Lee, Hiromichi Fukui Keio University, Japan Endo5322, Fujisawa, Kanagawa, 252-8520, Japan Email: yjlee@sfc.keio.ac.jp, hfukui@sfc.keio.ac.jp Abstract Over the last few years, the financial service market has seen a proliferation of new players and new channels by changes of the external environments. Banks have found themselves facing more aggressive competition, uncertainty and unlimited opportunities. Therefore, they must examine their strengths and opportunities and take a competitive position in the competitive marketplace. Furthermore, banks have to reconsider and reevaluate fundamental assumptions about how they reach their markets to build efficient branch marketing strategies. That’s what market segmentation analysis is for awareness of their customers and marketplace. Especially, GIS based these analyses by spatial data and attributes data such as demographic and socioeconomic data are relevant and useful to identify the market characteristics and find new market with similar characteristics. This study examined the relevance between market characteristic of each area and bank branch locations of present state in Tokyo for making efficient bank branch strategy using GIS with demographic, socioeconomic, major commercial banks data, and spatial data of Tokyo 23 wards. |