Using GIS as a Marketing Decision Support System to Help Amari Studios Locate New Customers and Effectively Direct Marketing and Advertising Efforts

Amari Studios is a small yet very successful company. Currently the company gains customers through word of mouth advertising, website promotion, and limited radio advertising. This has worked well for Amari Studios and has allowed it to establish itself in the Sioux Falls, South Dakota USA market. However, management believes it is ready to increase business by enlarging its client base. Before Amari Studios begins searching for new customers, it must define its customer profile and then geographically locate those consumer groups. A customer profile defines the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of a business’s target customer segment (Sliwinski, 2002). For a business to grow, a business needs to know what type of customer it serves and where to find more of them. This project analyzed the city’s census data to locate census blocks containing high percentages of potential customers best-fitting Amari Studios customer profile. These criteria were integrated into a GIS model. Once identified, a subset of 100 of the best “ideal” census block addresses along with another 100 addresses from another census block not selected as “ideal” were used in a direct mailing marketing campaign to determine the level of customer interest and validate the GIS model.