When you set up a shop or small store, its profitability may be at stake when your immediate environment changes. Moving your store to another location may be the safest move to make but it requires that market research techniques be applied.
Yet, such a move is not risk-free. Besides the selection of several potential locations for your business, you need metrics and figures to make your decisions. Those figures are usually provided by market research techniques which we make available to everyone, including small shop owners, thanks to our optimized tools and techniques on the one side, and to financial subsidies on the other hand.
Analyzing your current customer base
We usually start by analyzing the current customers of a shop : who are they, where are they coming from, what are they buying. This gives us the base to understand and validate the alternative areas where the shop could potentially be set up.
If you don’t perform this analysis upfront you’ll have no comparison basis and all subsequent analysis will be worthless
Measuring and identifying flows of potential customers is crucial
The next step is to measure the flows of customers within the new area and to “qualify” them. Qualifying means in this case determining of what kind of people the flows are made of : the age range, the male/female mix, what they are likely to do in terms of occupation (believe us you can guess a lot from the appearance of people).
Comparing the current and the future areas
Finally you need to compare quantitatively and qualitatively the flows observed and measured. It is from this comparison that conclusions will be drawn on whether or not the new area is worth of interest.
Advice for your market research
Don’t decide on a location for your store or brick-and-mortar shop without applying carefully such a market research technique. Such an analysis is not expensive (taking the possible subsidies into account the price is usually between 2500€ and 4000€) and it may save you from possible financial problems and even bankruptcy. We have seen in the last years (actually since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008) numerous examples of shops and stores which went bankrupt because the areas where they were located and the population they addressed did change. Although crisis of this magnitude can hardly be foreseen, we always try in our analysis to describe the foreseeable future of the area; for instance we get in touch with local authorities and real-estate agent to draw a picture of what the area may become in the next 5 to 10 years.
If you think about moving your shop to another location or, more simply, if you are currently looking for the ideal location for your store, call us or contact us by email and we’ll be delighted to make you an offer within 24 hours.
Posted in Marketing.
