Marketing Geography

PART A: Trade area delimitation for dealerships
1. The attached map shows the distribution of locations for a luxury automobile dealership in the Toronto Area on a base map of census tracts and income. The triangles show existing dealerships. The choropleth map shows average household income by census tract (the darker the greater). The thick yellow lines are major highways. All the automobile company’s luxury models are available at all the dealership locations. Prices, service levels and opening hours are also much the same. Describe the spatial distribution of the stores. What locational strategy is apparent?
2. On the map draw Thiessen polygon trade areas for all the existing dealerships (shown in triangles).
3. Identify with a symbol theoretically best sites for new dealerships. Briefly explain your choices.Use Google Maps with the satellite option activated to explore some of the new sites. Identify problems with some of the theoretically best sites you have identified. Give the map an appropriate title and legend (you can use the white space to the south east of the map to place the legend and title).
4. Some of the census tracts are only partially inside a trade area. How would you deal with these partial census tracts?
5. Identify the limitations of the application you have executed for this particular set of retail outlets in this particular geography. How appropriate is it to apply the methods to this set of stores? Could alternative normative methods help in this analysis?
PART B: Market evaluation using census variables
6. Census Data Collection. You will be familiar with some census variables from Appendix Two in the textbook which shows selected census variables for the entire Toronto CMA and one census tract (535034.02). 



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