Markets

Cutting through the data maze….

Useful Demography

Demography describes the social characteristics and vital statistics of people, families, and households within a geographic boundary. A variety of secondary sources provide free or low-cost online access to useful data. Developing an in-house, ” fast and easy” demographic resource is an important step in selecting the social conditions and the economic variables such as the cost of housing or access to employment that would be of greatest use to your organization or company.

Evaluate the depth of need for goods and services both public and private on a per capita basis. The research includes an improved understanding of the changing quality of economic demand on local businesses in terms of market size. Our Demographic Reports review options and help select the information deemed most useful to the client’s immediate needs.

Market complexity…
Whether for-profit businesses or nonprofit community organizations corporations the tools for managing changes in market conditions are best understood when regional data is compared to local knowledge. A well-known tactic for evaluating these changes is advanced demographic research on the dollars and cents of local markets.

A key asset of every community is its uniqueness, including the ability to act on an issue quickly. Acquiring an advanced Demographic Market Report on local commercial districts will reveal local small businesses’ capacity to capture local spending and if local nonprofits can get down to business with businesses.

Also known as a “drill down” method, the process helps community groups to launch a competitive response to large corporate retailers in business-to-business and business-to-community dealings. The policy has encouraged local nonprofit organizations with a public service mission to consider “running a business” to “fill in the retail gaps.” This has been wrong-headed.

In most urban communities today, the spending of as few as 25% of the households represents 75% of local retail spending. Still, local business or community advocates only see 75% of lower-income households whose spending power is only 25% of the market. Changing the business model to make the powerful 25% happy would be competitively good for everyone.

If you are a community-based nonprofit organization dealing with the concentrations of poverty, consider “transshipment” controls. This effort changes the means of delivery in the journey to free people trapped in self-destructive and community-destructive cycles.