The Use of Geomarketing for the Location and Branch Network Planning on the Example Porsche. A Critical Examination of the Applicability of the Current State of Research

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2,0, University of Applied Sciences Essen, language: English, abstract: This thesis with the topic is about Geomarketing theory and its approach in the automotive industry, more specifically surveyed on one explicit example of Porsche. The automotive industry is experiencing a development from a sellers' market to a buyers' market, as evident in the marginal increase of registration figures in recent years and in the additional price pressure on the car market. Equivalently, the increasing degree of individualization in society and thus the differentiation of demand, is leading to a breakdown of markets into smaller market segments to which the car manufacturers have to deal with. This prevailing pressure also affects the management level and causes the need to make the right decisions and avoid failures. Analogue to these developments two trends in marketing have gained significance in recent decades. On the one hand, the increasing data and information sets, which allow improved screening of the market, have gained importance. On the other hand, there is the technological development that enables assimilating large amounts of internal and external data on the basis of spatial structures. As a result of this development, the instrument Geomarketing has been established. This thesis deals with the elaborate assessment of the application of Geomarketing within location as well as branch network planning and practice. More specifically, this thesis handles the approach of the car manufacturer Porsche AG. The overall aim of the paper is to explain the role of Geomarketing for strategic planning processes in an automotive company with special focus on location and branch network decisions. The aim also is to find out how far Geomarketing causes benefits.