In today's highly competitive environment, marketing is a customer-orientated operation that is essential for business success. Beaumont and Inglis, market experts argue that marketing departments face real problems in fully understanding their markets and the potential customers for their products and services. Marketing analysis is proving relevant and useful in this context

Marketing analysis covers a wide range of topics. Marketing guru Beaumont notes that conventionally the marketing mix can be summarized as the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion. He suggests that these should be supplemented with a fifth P - that of data processing, which makes it possible to integrate spatial, and communication convergence and the marketing mix (see Figure 1 below).

This highlights the central role IntelliM can play as a tool to integrate the various components of the marketing mix to assist strategic decision making.

This is a useful list of the kinds of questions that need to be answered by marketing management (see Figure 2). These illustrations demonstrate the power of IntelliM in broadening the perspective of marketing analysis in market research and that Spatial information provide useful technical support for data management in a competitive environment by integrating various sources of information, as well as producing attractive graphic displays of data in map form.

Marketing research exists to serve the information needs of both operations and strategy development in the business environment. The methods developed in marketing research are as diverse as the problems addressed, and methodologies and concepts have been borrowed from a variety of disciplines. Among these, statistical methods have become very important: most of the standard statistical analytical procedures have been widely applied in marketing research as part of what is described as a general trend towards a more quantitative approach to marketing research.

Demographic trends, which form the underlying framework for customer analysis, requires access to and appropriate exploitation of official and other external demographic data. It is also important that businesses make full use of the data internally available, that is the data associated with products and existing customers derived from records of purchase. The power of IntelliM in these areas is its ability to manage data from a number of different sources and its capability for interactive visualization in exploring data and the results of analyses.

As the benefits of collecting more customer information are gradually realized, the potential for systems that analysis customer data as well as external data sources has dramatically increased. IntelliM geo-processing functions provide a means for enhancing databases in two respects: first by linking with other spatial data (e.g. geodemographics), and secondly by adding value to databases. For example, given the strong association between social status, income and location (e.g. by postcode or suburb), the analysis of customer addresses makes it possible to match these with income and social status.

Customer data with addresses are now routinely collected for billing and maintenance purposes, and these spatially based customer files can be used directly to describe the current customer base through profiling. Flowerdew and Goldstein (1989) suggest that the most important market research data are product-purchasing profiles, which give social and demographic profiles of those people most likely to purchase a particular product or use a particular service. The profiles of existing customers can be used to highlight the potential for cross-selling services.

Combining Spatial Information and other techniques will create appropriate and diverse approaches to problem solving (Maguire, 1995). One advantage of linking statistical methods with Spatial Information is to integrate it’s capabilities with the power of statistical analysis, and to effectively use data from different sources for market analysis.

Another advantage of this is that users can visualize spatial data in different forms, for example visualize the spatial distribution of data on maps prior to further statistical analysis, and visualize spatial data in various statistical graphs and diagrams which may yield more insights into the nature of distributions. In this way, the application of IntelliM in market analysis may be seen as a tool for reaching a desired solution for the client and not merely as an end in itself.