ArcGIS Business Analyst Helps Norwegian Group

29 October 2007, 9:31am

ESRI's ArcGIS Business Analyst helps the Norwegian retail group Coop Norge AS to refine their marketing strategies.

Image: This map displays the location of COOP stores in relationship to their competitors and the local road network. Warm colors depict the areas of highest population density.
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For nearly 150 years, cooperative societies have played an important role in the commerce of Norway and its Scandinavian neighbors. Coop Norge AS (www.coop.no), the dominant retail market cooperative in the country, includes 165 individual cooperative societies and more than 1,000 main street shops. The Coop manages six distinct retail chain outlets that sell a variety of goods ranging from groceries to sports equipment. More than 25 percent of all groceries sold in Norway are purchased at one of Coop Norge's shops.

Coop Norge issues its shoppers unique identification cards that provide them greater discounts on their purchases, while at the same time allowing the cooperative to collect shopping habit information to better serve its customers. The cooperative wanted to analyze this data geographically to better understand their clientele in relationship to specific regions and develop more focused marketing campaigns for its products.

Coop Norge chose ESRI's ArcGIS Business Analyst software, which was provided by Geodata AS, its Norwegian distributor, to evaluate its existing stores and their product mix and appraise its marketing strategies more quickly and accurately.

"Business Analyst makes it possible for us to analyze data from our own client database along with external public data in a whole new way, says Jon Arne Falk, Head of Analysis at Coop Norge. "The unique mix of data displayed in the map presentations gives us very valuable and intuitive insights into our customers and their buying habits," he adds.

By analyzing its data, Coop Norge was able to determine the geographic location and demographic categorization of its customers for any designated shop and target specific marketing campaigns accordingly.

Using Business Analyst, Coop Norge examined the results of various marketing campaigns in relationship to specific stores to better understand the shopping habits of its customers. This analysis allowed the company to reduce its marketing costs, while increasing sales by adjusting the product mix in some stores and conducting more specific advertising efforts at the local level.

Jim Baumann, ESRI

Writes about international GIS-related topics.