Advanced Business Environment Analysis: Identifying opportunities with advanced thematic mapping and data analysis

Introduction

Janice Brown and Steven Bent plan to open a new home center in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The center, called Living in the Green Lane, will offer a variety of environmentally friendly building products, home improvement products, and construction technologies.

To develop a business plan for this enterprise, Janice and Steven must analyze the market environment in the Twin Cities area to determine if this area will support such an enterprise. This analysis involves seeking green customers, identifying potential competitors, examining transportation patterns, and pinpointing retail centers that draw consumer traffic.

Janice and Steven have discovered that "green" customers tend to have higher levels of income, education, and home value than the general population of the United States. They wish to determine if the distribution of these households and their proximity to competitors and retail centers will support their retail concept. They have directed you, in your capacity as the firm's business geographic information system (GIS) analyst, to use GIS resources to explore these questions to determine if the Minneapolis-St. Paul market area will support their business plan.

Specifically, you will create customized datasets for color-coded mapping, extract and display map layers for competitors and shopping centers, and use smart map and dynamic ring tools to identify potentially attractive locations for the first Living in the Green Lane store.

Location

Minneapolis-St. Paul core-based statistical area

Time to complete the lab

Four to six hours

Prerequisites

An understanding of the importance of environmental scanning in the process of developing marketing strategy

Access to Esri Business Analyst Desktop Premium 10

Data used in this lab

Demographic and consumer spending data at various levels of geography

Major highways and streets

Business listings

Shopping center listings