Keywords: Foreign Direct Investment, strategic planning, marketing, sales, demographic, postcodes
Project Description
The application used by the multi national cosmetic company AVON enables strategic planning, tactical selling and for monitoring the growth of sales in the region.
Since 2000, AVON Romania - The Company for Women has been using applications and tools for improving its marketing and sales operations. This has enabled the company’s analysts to plot and visualise the commercial successes in the context of both regional geography and demographic structure. The driver for this application was the increasing difficulty the company faced in managing a fast growing database of sales representatives, customers and regional sales information. With an excellent market growth, and only simple databases at hand, the managers found themselves unable to see the forest from the trees! They couldn't identify either the business drivers or the potential weaknesses.
The application has enabled the company to monitor the demand for cosmetics based on demographic data for each region, including both descriptive variables - total population, gender and age structure - and predictive data - including income. The company operates a "self-feeding" lifestyle information database.
The application has enabled the company to penetrate the Romanian market; understand the market dynamics; monitor progress; and rapidly become the market leaders.
The company believes that the application has provided the Company with an easy method to access and analyse the operational information at any given time, which has enabled the company to gain a significant competitive advantage. The output from the application is now a key component of the company’s management processes.
| Benefits |
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application has: |
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· Enabled the performance at a regional level and to be immediately visualised.
· Enabled improved co-ordination of the sales activities of each regional manager.
· Enabled the dynamic re-definition of sales territories based on consumer trends as the market evolves.
· Enabled the company to optimise its resources through balancing the allocation of sales territories so that the market is covered as evenly as possible.
· The geographic analysis has enabled the company to visualise their competitors and in to gain an immediate impression as to which geographic areas the company faces competition.
· Has reduced costs as a result of a more cost effective dissemination of promotional materials.
· Enabled AVON (Romania) to create new processes and sales instruments, which have been adopted within AVON Europe as examples of best practice.
· Improved communication with the company’s field personnel through the display of hard copy output from the application within the companies offices.
· Enabled the company to measure their achievements against the targets set for each region which enables fine-tuning and adjustments where necessary in order to hit the regional sales targets.
· Helped the company’s decision-making process. |
Issues
Currently the available information does not allow for higher fragmentation analysis beyond Census tracts for the capital city of Bucharest (160 polygons). There is an on-going data collection project to sub-divide the existing geographic information data into smaller units. The demographic and lifestyle information within Romania does not have the same level of granularity as that of the postcodes.
| Data
used |
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· Romania Map 1:200 000 with demographics down to 13 thousand settlements sourced from Geo Strategies a private sector data provider.
· Digital map for Bucharest sourced from Geo Strategies
· Corporate database - representatives, sales information, and personnel files for example. |
Case Study for EU GINIE Report
January 2004
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| For further information, please contact Geo Strategies at: |
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Geo Strategies Ltd |
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Geo Strategies SA |
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St John's Innovation Centre |
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Str G-ral V. Milea, 10A |
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Cowley Road |
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Sibiu 550331 |
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Cambridge CB4 0WS |
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Romania |
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United Kingdom |
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Tel: |
+44 (0)1223 205080 |
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Tel: |
+40 (0)269 210832 |
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Fax: |
+44 (0)1223 205081 |
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Fax: |
+40 (0)269 211165 |
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Email: |
maps@geo-strategies.com |
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Email: |
maps@geo.strategies.ro |
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