Delimiting and predicting market areas for consumer services outlets using geographical information systems

Abstract

The globalisation of economy is intensively affecting to retail and consumer service sector because of the development of important multinational companies that exert an aggressive competition on small and medium sized firms. The need of improving competitiveness claims the use of geographical technologies allowing to deep into the analysis of market areas. In this paper, using empirical data, it is presented the methodology to delimit the market area of a service outlet and to formulate simple predictive models of it, applying a geographical information system. The intended objective is to try and to spread easy and effective techniques to get better grounded spatial strategies for the firms.