GIS for Rural Marketing Designing a GIS based marketing solution "LinCompass" application was developed as a complete solution covering all the requirements. The system was designed to allow the user to analyze the market statistics based on the various data (including demographics) and eventually help in identifying the market areas for brand promotion based on the selected parameters. The application enables the user to prepare a route plan for covering the target places in the predefined time period. Refer fig. 1 for schematic diagram of the application. "LinCompass" runs on ArcView, desktop GIS software. It has been developed by using avenue, a customization language of ArcView. Making of "LinCompass" involved data collection, map conversion, data normalization and customization to meet the requirements. 
At various levels problems were encountered mainly the non-availability of data at one source. For some of the districts, desired data could not be found for which either data was gathered manually or was processed. Process of collection took approximately two months. Also there were errors in the data: such as missing data, wrong figures etc. Data was then cleaned thoroughly to remove such errors. This study further describes in inclusive functionalities of the application and its features. |