I was reading a small post on the All Points Blog: The LAPD made an error in their geo-coding and plotted the area around city hall with a high crime rate. This information is totally incorrect.

If a geo-coding error can occur like this in the States, where a rich and fresh supply of data is easily accessible, imagine what can happen in emerging economies where such data luxuries are hard to come by. Think of the impact such inaccuracies could have.

Yes we have Google Maps, Microsoft Earth and other mapping engines, but how much faith can we really put in the accuracy of their data?

“Most spatial data is inaccurate,” says Paul Zandbergen, a professor of geography at the University of New Mexico who studies the quality of online maps.

I think it is important to realize that spatial data is inaccurate, but also it is important to realize that a certain percentage of inaccuracies are acceptable. Of course we can strive to be as accurate as possible, but all the while knowing that 100% accuracy is not within reasonable grasp.

In many Asian countries we find data that is dead wrong and or non-existing, and to bring it to an acceptable level of accuracy is as challenging as eating ice cream in Death Valley before it evaporates.

It’s a real challenge to convey data discrepancies with clients, but it is crucially important that they know that data cannot possibly be 100 percent accurate. If it isn’t perfect in Western developed countries, where location based intelligence has been around for a long time, how can it be expected that it could be perfect in Asia?

But on a positive note, getchee can produce data with a 70 to 80 percent accuracy rate, and that’s something to stay optimistic about.

A quick review of the 3 top mistakes retailers will make when entering China.

Shanghai, China

1) What you see is not always what you get.

Imagine a shopping center in Shanghai on an average Friday. There are families with children, young people and those going to work or out to lunch. Immediately you may think this would be an ideal location for your store. You see your target group and the tenant mix in the shopping area is what you want to attract. Your feeling says this is the place, but is that enough to make a decision? – No.

Chinese people are notorious for browsing and window shopping. They take time to compare products in different stores to ensure the best price. They may also just spend their time in malls because they are nice and warm, especially during the cold winter months.

When opening a new location, it shouldn’t come down to a gut feeling. It should be based on facts and figures. Your team needs to do their homework, and must be able to back up findings with some sort of scientific process. Opening a new outlet based on a gut feeling can be a huge mistake, considering the fact that you are dealing with a foreign market place, where cultural and social differences can make a significant impact on your bottom line.

2) Understand the culture.

You need to know the local culture and traditions of the region you want to enter. The last thing you want to do is open a store that only collects dust.

Shanghai as a mega-city, looks very modern and open, but when you scratch the surface you see a whole different layer, where old customs and beliefs are still in place. People tend to stick to certain brands because of word of mouth or because they are familiar with the product. Knowing this information is vital, because it can help you find out why your competitors outperform you.

3) Not everybody likes your product. Be innovative!

One of the reasons that KFC is widely popular in China is not because of the fact that the people here are fonder of chicken than beef. (Ok, a little bit is true)

But KFC constantly expands and innovates itself over and over again. It now sells the traditional congee and you-tiao (a long piece of dough deep fried in oil) breakfast. Who would have thought that KFC would sell traditional local breakfast instead next to their famous burgers? If you would have told me this 4 years ago, I would have burst out in laughing and thought it was a good joke.

Accurate and reliable data is hard to come by. Even if you manage to find some, it is not always up-to-date or consistent. What needs to be done is standardize all levels of information so that objective results can be found. Only then can you make an informed and positively healthy decision.

Mickey Mouse

Usually I write each month about my daily work in beating the great Asian challenge with regards to location and data intelligence. This time it is different; last month I was visiting Disneyland Hong Kong and I truly enjoyed the whole experience.
I believe the Walt Disney Company is one of the most successful marketing stories since the 50’s.

My friends all warned me that it was too small, no thrill-rides, not adventurous. They warned me it is for small children; however that didn’t stop us from having a fantastic day, all thanks to the great marketing strategy from the Walt Disney Company!

As soon we were in the Disney train that took us to the theme-park, it already set the tone of the whole experience. The magic began at the entrance. We could hear the familiar Disney tunes and feel the energy. We felt like little kids that we once were.

The goal of Disneyland is to give you an un-forgettable experience, no matter if you are young or old. The whole idea behind Disneyland is that as a family, young and old can enjoy all activities. Every crew member, (instead of calling them employees; Disney uses the word crew) is fully engaged in their role to make your experience as unforgettable as possible. The total lay-out of the park is not a coincidence, it takes careful planning and decisions into consideration. The way how they display their products is thoughtfully carved out, playing very well into human emotions.

When marketing can hit your soft spot and your emotions, then I believe that it has been successful. The next step is of course to stay aligned with your customer emotions, but that is a whole different story.
For now I am that little kid who had just experienced being young again when I saw all my favorite Disney figures come back to life and can really play all the adventures that I once saw on TV.

Last month they decorated the park with a Halloween theme. And being the scary cat that I am, I had the courage to enter one of the ghost-houses and one thing I can say for sure is: Who needs a roller-coaster ride that goes mach 3, when the ghost-house almost made me wet my pants? That is just priceless.

Introducing getchee Enterprise v1.0b. This Web-based location intelligence tool is packed full of great features that enable effective site selection, network management and trade area analyzes for site locations in Asia.

Getting Started – Learn how to create projects and start using getchee.

Site Selection – Tools to help you easily find and analyze great site locations.

Site Ranking – Find out which sites outperform others. It’s a painless process.

Trade Area Analysis – Understand how your trade areas interact with other trade areas.

Starbucks Coffee Thailand - A Case Study

Problem

With escalating capacity and competition, time and speed to market in untapped territories increase Starbucks’s effort to remain a leader in the Thai marketplace.

Solution

A getchee system to segment different demographics and estimate sales potential of a given area, based on customer visits and expenditure per ticket.

Summary

Company - Starbucks Coffee Thailand, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Starbucks Corporation, with its first store open in July, 1998, is a relatively young presence in Thailand, nevertheless has seen rapid expansion throughout the nation in the past decade. Of the total 131 stores in Thailand, 94 are located in Bangkok. The core Store Development team, made up of 3 people, has their vision to continue expanding within Bangkok, a market that looks saturated at first glance, but is still believed to have great potential. The strategy is to unearth hidden pockets in the city where a primary target audience of 16-44 year olds can be found in high concentrations. A single store generally serves an average of 200-300 customers a day. Malls with a rounded tenant mix are attractors and popular streets with heavy footfall seem like strong locations. Careful store planning is necessary to justify a minimum investment of 250k USD per store.

Challenge - Neighborhood demographic data in emerging markets, including Thailand, retain at a macro level and surveys carried out to increase granularity bear high costs. Traditionally, Starbucks Coffee Thailand had deployed information from paper and digital maps, and assembled data with further support from site surveys to make siting decisions. With added local knowledge and gut feeling, short-listed locations are pretty much set for store execution. With escalating capacity and competition, time and speed to market in untapped territories increase Starbucks’s effort to remain a leader in the Thai marketplace.

“Instead of augmenting our best practices, getchee gives me a quick glance of an area so I have a good sense of the kind of trade area the potential store is in.”

Manual labor, a concerted effort, sees a new light as location intelligence with enhanced data and mapping capabilities added a new dimension to the development process. As a regional effort, getchee, Asia’s only location intelligence mapping tool recommended to the local team by the Asia Pacific head office located in Hong Kong, increased efficiency mainly by saving time on data collection and enhancing siting capabilities by validation of target demographics and location dynamics. “Instead of augmenting our best practices, getchee gives me a quick glance of an area so I have a good sense of the kind of trade area the potential store is in”, says Supoj, Development Manager of Starbucks Thailand. Demographics distilled to a trade area size as small as 200m are made available via quick reports, easily printable or shared through getchee’s Enterprise tool.

Result - Based on Starbucks’ specific target audiences, getchee is able to segment the different demographics of the population and estimate the sales potential for a given area based on customer visit frequency and expenditure per ticket.

“We can’t cut and paste U.S. standards of siting in these regions, but with getchee, a pattern can begin to form.”

Furthermore, enriched proprietary data such as day-time and working population gives the team an even more accurate estimation of transactions during the day compared to night-time. Starbucks Thailand gained answers through hard numbers found conveniently via a few clicks on getchee through the Web. Other advantages the team found were the heat maps which they deemed unprecedented in the market. The maps are customized to the relevance of the coffee business and help visually focus on areas that matter. “These intensity or heat maps save me a lot of time when I’m making a search”, Supoj says. Even in the early stages Starbucks Thailand found getchee uncomplicated to use. With the suggestions and tweaks the team freely shares in the process not only reflect on the output, but improves future product enhancements. Overall, the Asia Pacific head office says that the benefits getchee brings are beyond data and numbers. It is in a standardized process they inculcate through the use of getchee that the regional managers can increase expansion and siting methods in the long term via the same platform. “We can’t cut and paste U.S. standards of siting in these regions, but with getchee, a pattern can begin to form,” Supoj explains.

Download this case study.

Press Release: getchee Expands Automotive Clients

getchee, a Taipei-based data and Web analytic company announced collaboration with GeoPro, a professional management services company, to expand services to automotive clients.

“This new target industry marks a continued relationship that GeoPro and getchee have fostered since getchee’s induction in 2007,” said Bruce Berkman, Chairman of getchee. “We look forward to providing great value map data for automotive professionals throughout the region.”

GeoPro will provide custom management consulting services to automotive clients to expand their brand, and adopt getchee Enterprise to visualize the project data and outputs.

“While world economies aim to balance in today’s turbulent conditions, managers are compelled to make even more strategic assessments on market planning, ” says Wong Chin Chu, Product Marketing Manager of getchee. “Seeing is believing, and the availability of online data, by getchee, is changing the way retailers seek and make location decisions.”

Points of Interest

You have seen them around; they stand at the door openings looking at you. With an instant screening process they can decide if you should be approached or not. When you are in a rush, you walk by them without saying a word, or increase your pace and say you are late for a meeting once they flag you down. I am talking about surveyors!

I mentioned in a previous post that we have a dedicated team who are out on the streets collecting information through surveys, not only from consumers but also point of interest data. They are verifying that no road was left out of their survey. Did I mention of this all happens without a GPS? Due to laws and regulations, foreign companies are not allowed to own and use GPS devices in China.

If only we were able to implement GPS systems, our work would be so much easier! It is not the case, however, and we have to do it the old-fashion way; with a pen, paper-map, a notebook and a good pair of shoes. Our guys are out there rain or shine making sure the maps and related information are correct.

These people collect the raw data for necessary to make intelligent business decisions. This data is enough to arm you with the knowledge necessary to know what side of the street to open your coffee store on.

They do this day in and day out to make sure we are able to capture what is out there. These guys walk kilometers everyday or stand hours in a shopping area asking questions. Their hard work ultimately helps you make better decisions.

I think it is a job that people take for granted, and we don’t spend enough time realizing this. Next time when you see them in the field, please do them a favor and make their work enjoyable by answering a few questions.

Now will all the surveyors please stand up and receive a warm applause?

Parents line up to treat infected victims.

Flooding the headlines for weeks now has been the China tainted milk powder scandal. It has caused the death of four babies and sickened more than 54,000 children, not to mention causing national and global anxiety.

The milk scandal erupted last month when the public learned that melamine, which is used to make plastics and fertilizer, had been found in milk powder and was linked to kidney stones in children and babies. Other milk products, such as liquid milk, yogurt and products made with milk have also been found to be contaminated. The hardest hit areas are found mainly the northern provinces of China. Medical aid and advice needs to be deployed effectively to provide information and support to prospective victims and parents.

Tainted Milk Infected Areas

A quick analysis on the population of Tianjin (11 million people), reveals different concentration levels of impacted areas where a high density of 0-5 year olds are found. The sample case shows level-5 areas are high residential areas with many children, therefore more mobile care units are needed.

These mobile care units can be the direct contact point for concerned parents and if medical supplies permit, even preliminary health checks can be done. This way, the problem can be rectified quickly.

Location intelligence can help reveal which supermarkets or hyper marts sold more tainted milk. This information can be used with mapping to help the re-calls of the contaminated products.

The population was projected from 2005 statistics.
Methodology is owned by GeoPro, with data provided by getchee.

Case study assumptions: baby–toddlers from 0-5 years, residential areas, supermarkets/hyper marts which distributes milk products.