Optimizing your location network across markets is absolutely critical in today's economy.
In the past, merely researching thoroughly and tracking the opportunities presented by
others may have passed as effective location planning. But to succeed today,
it's critical to proactively define your optimal long-term target locations,
prioritize growth carefully, forecast sales with better accuracy, and respond
immediately to opportunities with the right decision support.

To accomplish this, it takes a very thorough understanding of all the business and market
information sources available, sophisticated analytics to turn data into conclusions, customized
systems geared toward addressing the tough decisions at hand, brand-specific models that are actually
calibrated against your own sales history and the business skills to put it all together
into an effective strategic plan and course of action.

We've developed a complete set of components that together form the "Market Development Analytics" solution.
It's designed to provide a brand through one short project the kinds of sophisticated location planning
capabilities that even the largest organizations pursue over several years using extensive staff and
investments. Yet, the solution is customized to your specific brand so your resulting tools and
capabilities are completely unique and the strategic advantages enjoyed completely confidential to others.

If you merely want to be notified of location opportunities and receive research material about them as
they're identified, there are plenty of capable service providers out there. If you want to make the leap
to being a proactive industry leader in location planning and do so in short time, talk with us.

The challenges involved in achieving a strong sales forecasting
model are extensive. Our methods allow us to effectively
capture the patterns that exist between the actual sales
performance of your specific brand and all the specific,
complex conditions faced by those same locations.
The success we've enjoyed in developing outstanding predictive
sales models stems directly from these processes and our
unique expertise, including:

• 20 years of successful cross-industry modeling experience.
• Expertise in "spatial" analytics incorporated.
• Expert knowledge of the relevant market data sources available.
• 20 years of advanced data processing experience.
• More thorough model development processes than typically used.
• Deployment of the best model development tools.
• Extensive involvement of management and local knowledge.

The resulting benefits are tremendous:

• Small improvements in sales prediction can lead to staggering financial improvements when spread over many location decisions.
• With a model, much of the decision making process can be automated.
• Systems can apply the model to thousands of locations to find opportunities.
• Standardized site assessment processes across site decisions and brands facilitated.
• A much better understanding of your business and what's driving performance.
• The ability to identify the performance that should be reached given the conditions faced is offered when it comes to assessing managers and operators.

For assessing individual site opportunities, executing our short-term
"market development analytics" project leaves you with all the tools,
capabilities, and training you'll need to make the decisions internally,
such as the Instant Site IntelligenceTM system.

In determining your optimal long-term target locations, the processes
we deploy incorporate effective strategic market planning processes,
extensive analytics, an extremely wide range of market
factors, and your own knowledge about your business, markets, competition,
and site opportunties.

We apply Automated Site DiscoveryTM, where our developed sales models are applied
to each of tens of thousands of locations across the country, with sales
projections assigned to each and results depicted visually in mapping systems.
We also incorporate extensive market research, advanced
geographic information systems analysis, thorough profiling of
each location considered, and appropriate network positioning strategies
in coming up with the optimal long-term location plan.

Most organizations simply can't complete these processes effectively given
the tremendous time involved when they don't have all their data, systems,
analytical methods, and processes working at their capacity for them.

Within just a few weeks, we can deliver an optimized long-term market plan
with the specific set of target locations prioritized and complete with sales
projections, statistical profiles, maps, and plan reporting, even if that means hundreds
of locations being selected.

Determining which specific markets to penetrate and how to
prioritize markets in ways that optimize your long-term success
can't be left to simplistic methods involving the wrong metrics,
incomplete market ranking models, or wait-and-see approaches.
We help you get all the right information for the right market
definitions together and apply an approach that includes your
involvement and preferences. Components of this service include:

• Target consumer profile identification.
• Regional brand health assessment.
• Complete quantitative profiling of markets.
• Selection, prioritization, and identification of target presence
  for markets based on alignment with the right metrics.
• Market capacity and market suitability for new entry.
• Detailed, analytics-based assessment of growth potential.
• Competitive intensity indexes.
• Unique plan development sessions to combine art and science.
• Policy and standards establishment related to market development.
• Control and monitoring systems design.

Our decision support systems provide you the
specific intelligence needed to make decisions
immediately for any location in the country
and anyone in the organization.

An enormous amount of complex analysis, data processing,
and mapping processes take place in the background within
just seconds to turn the data in your databases into this
decision support. The benefits are tremendous, including:

• Significantly improved site location decisions by
  having the right decision support readily
  available for all site opportunities.
• Significantly quicker site location decisions,
  resulting in both significant cost savings and
  fewer opportunities lost to competitors who
  are reviewing the same site location opportunities.
• New opportunities otherwise missed can be
  identified since the system allows any business
  leader to effectively “explore” locations within
  markets, quickly generating a quantitative
  assessment within seconds for each location.
• Better, interactive resources for formal
  site review sessions, produced in a few
  seconds rather than days

We combine the scientific analysis required
for decision-making and long-term planning
with the execution of on-site, survey-based impact
studies for individual cases. Forecasting incorporates
sophisticated "spatial interaction modeling"
plus analysis of available customer locations,
drive time accessibility, location "reach"
and market density. Models are calibrated against
your actual case-by-case cannibalization history.

Our on-site, survey-based impact studies are as
carefully designed and incorporate the following features:

• Unique mobile iPad® applications for survey execution
  with live links to corporate databases, real-time
  summary reporting, mapping, and user-friendly design.
• Optimal survey question content.
• Survey periods spanning 5 days and 50+ hours
  to ensure sufficient response volumes and daypart coverage.
• Customization to unique circumstances of individual cases and markets.
• Transparency and clarity surrounding methodologies deployed
  and how the study results relate to other cannibalization analyses.
• The "best of both worlds" offered: Objective impact study
  used to manage franchisee-related decisions and in depth
  analysis of all relevant data used to provide projections to management.
• Complete management of the program including recruitment,
  visitation scheduling, staff communications during execution, etc.
• Deployment of specialists who are thoroughly trained in these kinds of programs.
• Training session design and delivery in advance of each program.

The same level of detail that goes into our systems implementations
aimed at location planning are applied when GIS
systems need to be implemented for other purposes
at an enterprise level. The services involved for which
we maintain extensive expertise include the following:

• Strategic planning and scoping
• Systems design
• Formal project management
• Software and third-party vendor selection
• External data selection and acquisition
• Spatial database design
• Custom application development
• Integration with existing systems
• Data editing/maintenance process design
• Staffing (roles, functions, organization) design
• System development, installation, and testing
• Training
• System adoption (change management) strategy

Services deployed to improve the effectiveness of major marketing
initiatives, particularly those related to customer relationship
and experience management support, include the following:

• Business intelligence strategy, design and implementation
• Customer Experience Analytics programs
• Marketing database, report, and dashboard development
• Advanced targeting strategies and analysis
• Segmentation strategy, modeling and business integration
• Target consumer profile identification
• Customer survey design and analytics
• Text mining solutions
• Product and market basket analysis
• Local market profiling
• Campaign analytics
• Sales forecasting
• Marketing performance management systems
• Predictive modeling