GIS in Business - Routing analysis of Plaza Shoppers Lilian, S.C. Pun-Cheng*, Alice, W.C. Chu** *Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics **Institute of Textiles and Clothing The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hunghom, Kowloon, Hong Kong Email: alspun@polyu.edu.hk, btcchuwc@polyu.edu.hk 1. Introduction Fashion retailing represents a large business in Hong Kong. Retailers are often concerned with a truly profitable location for their stores, especially when land rent is so high in this highly urbanized commercial city. With the construction of many large shopping plazas in recent years, many retailers receive long lists of vacant stores from the land developer everyday. For retailers’ consideration, the different store locations will greatly affect their sales performance even if these locations are on the same level inside the same plaza. Retailers who select a good location enhance the chances of success because it allows greater flexibility in developing their product, price and promotion mix. There are indeed many factors affecting retail location selection (including fashion stores) such as the cost of land / rent, tenant-mix strategy, the competing and complimentary effects due to space allocation in the shopping centers (Brueckner, 1993), the store composition, the pedestrian traffic and flow, the size and accessibility. However, very few of these studies are analyzed or correlated with the routing pattern of shoppers. For instance, stores of high rental value are assumed to be more accessible with high pedestrian flow; but little investigation has been made as to how and why these shoppers follow a certain pattern or route, their visit intention, effect of plaza layout on profits, and so on, not at least in a quantifiable way. This study therefore aims at modeling the routing pattern of a particular group of multi-storey plaza shoppers by identifying a set of environmental or spatial variables, correlating them with non-spatial ones like frequency of passing-by, degree of familiarity. In this way, a set of attractive and repulsive variables might be identified, weighted and derived for gravity models of accessibility. Factors considered are those specific to fashion retailing in this study. With the use of geographical information technology and networking models, these parameters are quantified and a routing model is established to represent shoppers’ habitual walking pattern within the studied plazas. This is a new research direction in commercial GIS and the findings will be extremely useful for business marketing, especially in the decision making about store locations for the textile and clothing industry. It is hoped that the method can be applied universally for visits to all other shopping centers, so that fashion retailers will benefit in making their decisions on store location, as well as developers in the plaza layout design. Concerning geo-information system, the technology has always been considered as an effective tool in uncovering and analyzing patterns that involve a multiplicity of factors and voluminous data. However, the technology is often, at least for Hong Kong’s case, only applied in areas like construction engineering, environmental science and land development. It is seldom mentioned in commercial fields in which a good decision support system is equally as important. Recently, there are examples of applying geographic information systems (GIS) in cake shop businesses and real estate. Yet, neither is it widely applied nor popular in the commercial fields. In fact, the technology has the potential of promoting business with the following decision making capabilities:
Two shopping plazas of very different characteristics are chosen for this consumers’ routing behavior study. Both are situated in the busiest parts of the city, highly accessible and are popular for fashion shopping. The Grand Century Place (GCP) is a relatively modern and sizeable 7-storey plaza. Figure 1 shows its layout plan. It can be divided into 2 areas - A and B. Area A is designed as a circle with both outer and inner walking paths. Area B is designed as a two-way path. One end is connected with the outer circle path whereas the other to an escalator to other levels. All the plaza entrances are mainly located in Level 1. Linking the different levels are the lifts, the 3 escalators in area A and 1 escalator in area B. There are 198 stores in which 28% belongs to fashion retailing. These stores are usually selling branded products and mainly located in Level 2, 3 and 5. The next studied plaza, the Prudential Center (PC) is a smaller size one with 6 levels – B1 to B3, LG, UG and L1. Escalators connecting the different levels are in the middle of this rectangular shape layout. Some stores in Level UG and LG also have a street-level entrance. There are 130 stores in which 51% belongs to fashion retailing. These are mostly small boutiques, located mainly in Level LG and equally distributed in other levels.  Figure 1 Layout plans and node-path modeling of the two plazas An unconventional approach is adopted to collect and analyze the different data sets related to shoppers’ behavior in this study. The target shoppers’ walking paths inside the plazas are followed and recorded. These are analyzed with a set of environmental variables using the networking functions in a GIS. This approach focuses mainly on the interactivity of fashion stores and certain selected spatial components – plaza entrance/exit, lift, escalator and toilet. With a view that walking behavior is at times subtle especially for leisure shopping, consumers/shoppers may not know they have a certain preferred direction. In total, 73 shoppers to GCP and 62 to PC were interviewed and followed for at least one hour. The proportions between male and female shoppers and shoppers of different age groups were roughly the same.
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