GMAP Reflect on 30 Years of Change

Over 30 years ago, GMAP's groundbreaking location planning strategies created a industry that has become an embedded concept in business decision making. Following a management buyout, GMAP is trading independently again as GMAP Analytics and has gone full circle by moving back onto the University of Leeds campus! To celebrate this, and our website going live, we have written an overview of how GMAP, location planning methods and the retail environment have changed in the last three decades. Enjoy and let us know what you think!

 John Chesworth - Then & Now

Location planning is an embedded principle in retail decision-making. Retailers recognise the importance of ‘location, location, location’ for enabling their brands to grow successfully and sustainably whilst preventing harmful investment decisions. Developing the optimal retail network can help a brand access the right consumers and provide more brand awareness than any other marketing campaign due to the ‘halo effect’ whereby online sales increase within the vicinity of a store. The original location planning concept was about generating spatial understanding using GIS, but it has and continues to be enhanced by the development of increasingly sophisticated modelling techniques. 

In the 1980s, GIS mapping tools were only available on expensive computing systems. However, GIS applications are no longer as expensive or difficult to use, meaning they are not solely used by GIS experts. The simplification of GIS software packages, such as GMAP’s MVPLUS tool, means that geographical analysis can be conducted in-house across multiple departments, such as location planning, property acquisitions, or even marketing teams. 

In the early days, GMAP employed interns to create digital map layers from paper copies. Thankfully today this is in the past as mapping software has revolutionised the industry. On-going technological advances, such as automation and machine learning, allow us to provide our clients with ever more efficient, varied and insightful consultation. As no two projects are the same, our Spatial Interaction Models are built with the capacity to include bespoke elements, such as different retail formats, future developments, customer datasets and additional datasets, including the CAMEO geodemographic consumer segmentation. We also offer RetailVision, which is our off-the-shelf product that is built from our comprehensive Store Locations dataset and retail modelling techniques. RetailVision provides an extensive depiction of the UK retail market, with retail centre revenue estimations that can be used to rank and evaluate retail destinations. With the substantial changes within the industry, GMAP’s location planning methods have been adapted and will continue to develop to ensure our clients remain resilient to the increasing pressures in today’s retail environment.