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Once used only for CRA compliance, mapping has been shown to provide valuable marketing information, too. Now banks are using mapping to plot against competitors as well as to capitalize on responsive markets. Today, mapping technology is opening a whole new world for bank marketers.
"Nowadays mapping is the only way you can concisely interpret your market," says Carlos Rodriguez Jr., chief information officer for Dadeland Bank, Miami, Fla. "It's not enough to say you know your neighborhood because neighborhoods are too complex and sophisticated."
Rodriguez says by seeing a market area on a map, all of the neighborhood's characteristics and components are visible. "You put a table with the same information in front of employees and their eyes glaze over," he says. "You show them a color map and it all makes more sense."
As banks strive to further develop their markets, they are searching for ways to understand who their customers are, where they live and work and what characteristics they share. Plotting demographic and account information on a geographic, colorful map paints a more detailed picture of the market and its parameters, say bank marketers who have incorporated mapping technology into their marketing plans.
Mapping is a natural for banks because of the volume of data on hand and their emphasis on marketing, say experts. Many mapping software packages and services offered by customer mapping companies combine demographic and census information with geographic maps. Such programs can contain up to 120 different fields of information, such as lifestyle clusters, income or buying power indexes. "Mapping allows banks to do very targeted marketing in a geographical format," says Randy Drawas, vice president of marketing for MapInfo, Troy, N.Y.
Traditionally, mapping has been a tool used in Community Reinvestment Act reporting because it gives a clear description of location in lending to low- and moderate-income areas. As banks become more adept at using the technology, new opportunities for applying mapping are discovered. Mapping has moved from being a reporting tool to a strategic marketing tool, says Richard B. Miller, financial products consultant for MapPix, a custom mapping service in Evanston, Ill.
Miller says many MapPix clients are using mapping for benchmarking and visualizing their Marketing Customer Information Files (MCIFs) in direct mail campaigns....