GIS for Rural Marketing  Vijay Amanna Vijay.amanna@igenesys.com Suruchi Raina Suruchi.raina@igenesys.com Genesys International Corporation Limited, SEEPZ, Mumbai -96 Introduction Information forms the key source in strategic planning in any business. Businesses, be it retail marketing, consumer services, all require information such as sales, customers, inventory, demographic profiles, addresses and so on. Relating all these information geographically allows the user to spatially visualize data revealing relationship, pattern and trends. This paper brings forward a case study to show how implementation of GIS has helped in improving efficiency, better understanding and increased productivity of an international advertising agency. Also looks into the details of how GIS was customized to fulfill user’s requirement. Purpose An International advertising agency, took decision to move to GIS application as the information system to improve their work system. Market analysis and route being their main stream of working required Geo-demographic analysis. The existing system, allowed to analyze the data but lacked relation with their respective location, which impede the user to analyze geographically and overlook many hidden spatial factors. Time consumed in assessing the potential customers and designing of the route plan was enormous. GIS based marketing solution LinCompass, a decision support system was developed specifically to plan marketing campaigns. Application is developed on Avenue, customization language of ArcView. Salient features of the software Prioritization of district Function of district prioritization enables the user to rank the districts based on desired parameters (population, literacy, availability of medical and educational facilities, etc) and weightage. User can prioritize district considering only the rural areas, or urban areas or both. All the districts are assigned an Index value based on the weightings given to each parameter. District priority index becomes the first step towards Below the Line (BTL) campaign planning. Performing query Composite query Composite query gives user the option to drill into the data by running queries out of 128 parameters stored in the database. The user can have five parameters to run the query. This query can be invoked from within the buffer query as well as separately. User can generate 25 reports using varied AND/OR combinations. Buffer query Application in this function allows the user to perform spatial query. User can select places falling within a certain buffer distance from a nodal town by created a buffer of desired distance. Reports generation Application automatically generates reports of all finding along with the wanted information. Route Plan Creation ‘Route Designer’ involves the process of generating route plans with shortest path method. It provides user the facility to specify the ‘Start Place’ and the ‘Start Date’ of the route. A typical route plan would need a list of villages to be covered on a particular day which fulfill the desired conditions put in the query, the plan should automatically generate the list of villages/towns that will serve as night halt for the campaign. The night halt place has to have minimum criteria for selection. Complexity is added to the plan when stockist option is to be applied. Following are a few routes, combination of which is sought for the campaigning depending upon the product to be sold. For example: The required route should cover villages of population less than 4000, and each day it should visit three villages that should have either a haat day or a primary school or primary health center. The total travel distance should not exceed 60 Km and the distance between two villages should be less than 15 Km.
Stockist option: In all mobile unit operations there is a limitation on the amount of Stock, branding material that it can carry. When covering villages the unit might have to keep coming back to the feeder market to collect stock. Clicking ‘Select Stockist’ option the ‘Feeder Town’ function opens for selecting towns to replenish stocks and to specify the stock replenishing period. Draw Route options: ‘Linear’ option draws a linear route with start place and the end place different. It identifies the next destination on the basis of the assigned weightage, nearest place with the consideration of traveler covering 80km per day and night halt, which should be within distance of 25 km. ‘Circular’ option plans circular route, having the same start and end place. It works on the Traveling Sales Man Problem (TSP) model covering maximum places with optimum travel distance. Show Route options: ‘Automatic’ option would generate the route plan automatically based on the specified start and end dates and the input given in the route calculator. ‘Manual’ option will allow user intervention to confirm the selection of places to be visited on a day. In the situation of disagreement, the user has an option to select his preference. Night-halt selection: The night halt place can be either the nearest town or the last village of the day or user specified. User also has the option to select night halt from the places to be covered or even any other desired halt. Route plan for covering different states: it allows the user to cover different states in the one route plan based on the distance factor. Input data The application is based on the Census data (maps & tabular data) Conclusion Implementation of the application resulted into much easier identification of markets on the targeted population strata. Number of route plan with desired options could be worked automatically as well as manually with application within a few minutes. This resulted into radical cutback in the time between data processing, planning and implementation. Prior to development of application, planning marketing campaign took eight to ten days to produce a single route plan. Which involved tedious scanning of demographic data of all the rural and urban area in the desired parameters to prioritize the areas. Route was designed manually on the hard copy maps resulting into consumption of time. |