Crazy About Rugby

When Tango Communications and Air New Zealand came to us saying they were going to run another cool promotional campaign, we were delighted to have the opportunity to participate. Together with a number of other sponsors, Air New Zealand have put together a road trip in specially detailed Britz campervans, driven by Air NZ staff who won the opportunity to have an exciting road trip from Christchurch to Dunedin as outlined in this story.

The 10 campervans left Kings College late yesterday morning after a photo opportunity with Prime Minister John Key and are now on their way south.

The campervans all have GPS tracking in them and using GeoSmart Maps technology members of the public can view the current location of the vehicles in real time.

You can also view the route they took and read their journals, which are uploaded by mobile along the way.

Of course we are also keeping them up to date with AA Traffic Alerts to their mobiles, but fortunately so far the only possible problem has been a slip on the Desert Rd in the opposite direction to their journey.

The Air New Zealand Campervans Crazy About Rugby Tour is a great example of using location based services in a marketing campaign. We look forward to following their journey and invite agencies and marketers to talk to us about how they can also use our mapping tools and technologies in their campaigns.

Analysing Car Sales Using WebMap Part 1

This can apply to any segment, but lets use car sales as an example today. Lets imagine you are Sales Manager for a car dealership. You have a budget to achieve and you need to understand what is going on in your territory. You have 6 sales people, each has a unit and dollar budget and you have a budget for each model of car you have on offer.

You have got some excellent sales history, because you are selling big ticket items and you know where the people live who purchased your cars. Using the GeoSmart Business Visualisation Application you can see the locations of all the cars sold in December.

Small Car Sales

In this example, you are looking at small engine car sales from your dealership in an area of Auckland’s North Shore. This already shows you that you seem to have made sales in clusters of area, but there are other areas where you haven’t made sales of this class of vehicle.

Now lets think about other things you can do. First we can also overlay in different colours, car sales for December of your other models. You can display each model’s sales in a different colour. Now you may start to see some change, you may see that you get clusters of SUV or high end sedan sales in other areas, or you may still see gaps.

Another thing you can do as a separate view is look at all sales by one of your sales people on the map. In the same way as you did with the car models, you can assign each sales person a colour and display their sales on the map at the same time. You may again see some interesting things. Maybe one sales person is getting more sales in a particular area. He may be using a referral technique that the others can learn from. I’m being simplistic and generalist here, but there is always going to be a reason for the results you are getting and these reasons are often impossible to find using spreadsheets and tables on their own.

Another query you could run is viewing car sales per sales person by model, comparing them with other sales people per model on the map.

Given that you have sales history for each month, you could do the same sort of thing by visualising the above information by date. Assign a different colour to each month and you can then view each map and see if you can spot any trends. In your financial systems you have a wealth of information and we provide the ability to query that information and display in on the map. For example, some of the things you might query are:

• Gender of the purchaser?
• Age Group?
• Have they purchased from you before?
• What was their last car? Same brand or change? Larger or smaller?
• Was there a trade in?
• Was it a profitable sale?
• Was it for work or personal use?

The industry produces statistics each month. The latest reports on the AA Website say that the top selling model for December 2010 was the Toyota Corolla, but also interesting was that second was Toyota Hilux and third was Holden Commodore. So we have small to medium sized cars as most popular, but light commercials coming second and larger sedans coming third. Obviously there is much more to it and the dealership will have much more intelligence. The key here is whether the same trend is happening in your area and how you can capitalise on that knowledge, something I will look at in further blogs.

If this is of interest, please subscribe, or bookmark this blog and if you know anyone to whom this is of interest, why not send them a link. In business we all have a wealth of reports, but it is very easy to suffer death by statistics. There is an old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words and maps are a great way of delving into your business data to find knowledge that may otherwise remain hidden.

If you have questions, or would like to know more, please feel free to contact us.

GeoSmart adds new features to AA Maps

Are you deciding where to go on your summer holiday around New Zealand, or perhaps looking for a weekend adventure? Before you head out on your Kiwi Road Trip, have a look at what GeoSmart has added to the AA Maps web site.

There are many new and improved features. You can now create your complete itinerary and then change the order of the stops and even check the real time traffic conditions before you leave!

Let’s say you were going to take the kids to Rotorua. You had decided on the Luge, the Agrodome for a ride in the Zoorb, a jetboat ride and the other cool activities they have there, and Rainbow Springs to feed the trout. You set your itinerary on AA Maps and then decided to change the order so that you could finish the day with a meal at the top of the gondola ride and enjoy the views with a nice sunset. Now you can drag and drop the destinations, automatically generating new driving directions from A to B to C to take with you in the car, even showing the travel distance and driving time from one to the next.

You can find your accomodation from AA Maps and when you select it you can look for other amenities such as restaurants within 5km of the property. In this instance my search found 10 within 400 metres of the Millenium Hotel.

You can now set up a free account on the page and store your ‘Favourites’ so that you can find them again later and you can even leave a ‘rating’ once you have been there so that other people can appreciate the great experiences you enjoyed.

Many Kiwi’s feel they know their way around New Zealand and don’t need mapping websites. All good and well, but they don’t know there was a major accident which has blocked the Auckland Harbour Bridge or a slip which has closed the Milford Sound Rd. Now we have included AA Real Time Traffic as well as Traffic Web Cams. There are certain holiday spots that often have traffic jams at peak times such as Long Weekends or the start and end of major holiday periods. In winter there may be ice and snow, or slips that can close lanes or sometimes entire roads. Yu will be able to find this information on the AA Maps web site, where you can select from Minor Accidents, Major Accidents and Traffic Webcams where you can see the traffic flows, refreshed every minute.

If you live and drive in New Zealand, you are probably a member of the NZAA which has many great services to offer you. As a member, these are your services and another important feature is the Feedback button which allows you to tell us whatever you want to, whether it is suggestions for new features, a Point of Interest we didn’t know about, perhaps a restaurant that has changed ownership and has a new name. This is a never ending project as new technology continues to allow us to add new services and features.

If you would like a map on your own website, AA Maps will give you an idea of some of the features GeoSmart can offer you, but wait, there’s more. Many of the services we offer are not relevant to the AA Maps website. Of course there is also the AA Maps Bizlocator, which not only gives you a free map and directions from your company web page, but also lists it with car navigation brands so people in their cars can find their way to you. . We have lots of other services, so if it’s to do with location and you have a need, please feel free to ask us any time.

For more information about GeoSmart, please go to our Home Page. For AA Maps, click here.

This blog is offered as an interactive comunication, so please feel free to comment or make suggestions here as well. We welcome your feedback.