 Hey there, Chad Bond, you're here for High University Libraries. Several of my business students are currently researching the feasibility of opening a health food store in a particular town, in this case they're using Portland, Maine as an example. This video shows you how to use SimplyMap to actually try to figure out consumer demand for that kind of product in Portland, Maine or whatever location you're looking at. We're going to look at things like market research projections from Simmons local data. We're going to look at consumer buying power as well as retail market potential in those areas and also look at potential competitors in those areas using a database called SimplyMap. So here you go. So when you first log in to SimplyMap, what you'll see there's a couple of options here. If you've never used it before, you can either create a map or a standard report. We're going to start with a standard report and just click on the standard report tab. In order to do a report, you've got to do two things. You've got to have a location and you've got to have a variable. So we're going to start with locations first. And again, we're going to be looking at Portland, Maine and then also Cumberland County, Maine. So we're going to do counties to start with and let's do start with Maine and then we'll do Cumberland County, Maine. Use this location and you can use as many locations you possibly want. So I'm just going to do, let's do cities and let's do Portland. I'm sorry. Haha. Let's do Maine. There we go. And then Portland, getting ahead of myself there. Use this location. We'll close out of that. There's no data here yet because we have no variables. And what we're really looking at doing is trying to figure out if an organic or natural food store will actually thrive in Portland, Maine or Cumberland County, Maine. So we can start off by doing a search. We can search here and I'm just going to search for organic and do a search here. And this is going to give us a lot of variables here. For example, if we just wanted to base it on one variable, the most popular one here is the percent of people of household to use organic food. If you want to just use that one, we click use this variable and we can close out here. It's going to add it to our report. And now we've got the beginnings of a report here. So we can see that Portland, Maine is actually above the U.S. average in households who use organic food. So that's a good start right there. You can also go back to variables, back to search and go back to organic. And this is kind of a trick I like to use here in SimplyMap. And so what you can do is see, you know, this gives you all the variables that happen to mention organic. So you can actually go in and select these. But it may be a good idea to go to the actual folder to browse. So to do that, just go back. This is Simmons Local Food General Organic Foods, Organic Foods Household Uses. You go back to variables. There's a Simmons Local Folder there. If we scroll down here, there's food general. Scroll way down to organic foods. Organic foods household uses. And here we have people with percent who say no, use this variable, right, or number. You can say percent who also use organic baby food. You can use this variable. And as we do this, if you wanted all of them, you can just basically go over here and say use all variables. But that gets a little bit excessive. So I'd encourage you to kind of look for different ways to do that. So you might also want to look at consumer buying power in a particular area. So here we have expenditures at, let's see, we have a retail store section. Way down here. And so here is grocery, dining, and drinking. So here we have consumer buying power, household average in that area for grocery stores. Or we have the retail market power of that particular area as well. And so we went under stores and let's see, food and beverage stores. And let's see, there's specialty food stores that might be a good idea to look at for our health food, organic food place, right. You see there's also, you can look at grocery stores, things like that. As well, okay. So once we close that out, this will give us a nice little table here and you can basically keep adding data until your heart's content. If you wanted to, you can go up here and say, let's download the report as an Excel file. And it's yours to keep to manipulate that way, okay. You can also go in and do a map, okay. So this is one way you can do this, we can go under locations. And since we've already used Cumberland County, Maryland, I'm just going to click on recent. And there's Cumberland County, Maryland, use this location. And we don't have a data point yet, so we need a variable. I'm going to click on variables here, and let's also do recent. And let's do percent of people who use this house or who uses organic food, excuse me, let's use this variable. And now we can go down and see our map of Cumberland County. It looks kind of boring right now. What we can do is actually change this to zip codes. So we can see what zip codes have a high percentage of users of organic food, okay. Now if you want to identify those, all you have to do is go up under display options and then say show map labels. And so here we may say, well I wonder what kind of businesses are located there. We could go into other databases and try to do a proximity location for that kind of stuff, okay. Now you may say, well I want to locate my business way up here. Now before you do that, you probably want to figure out if there's actually businesses up there. So what you can do is go over here under businesses. And we're going to click on add condition. We can name this if we wanted to. I'm going to say SIC. SIC actually works better in here than NAICS codes. I'm going to do SIC is equal to, I'm just going to click on view list here. So that's going to give me an opportunity to browse. And if we scroll way down here, I happen to know that food stores are 5'4". All right. And here's grocery stores or miscellaneous food stores. Let's do miscellaneous food stores. And you'll see there's health food stores. There's also health and dietetic food stores. I'm going to choose the broader category. And so we'll use this code. And we'll say show businesses. I almost clicked out of that. Don't do that. Click show businesses. And so what it'll do is it'll go on our map and it'll create the points there that show you where these businesses are in relation to your percentage of people who use organic food. Now we see there's two shops up here. So we might not want to open one in that zip code area. If you click on it there, it'll tell you there is a general nutrition center. There's also morning dew natural foods grocery. So two potential competitors we might want to try to benchmark ourselves against as well. But also, you know, you can say that, well, I probably really shouldn't put a shop there. But you might think, well, this might be a better location, depending on, you know, other variables like how many people live there and maybe things like you could go back under our report here and see how much the average household income is and things like that in that area as well, which would be be good to look at and try to identify where you're going to put your store. If you'd like, you can actually edit the legend here of your map and go in and change it to whatever kind of crazy colors you want to. That's a good way to do that. You can also, you know, do predefined list here as well. But I'm just going to leave it as a red for the time being. You can also go under here and export the map as a image file to put in your PowerPoint. And then finally, you can go under actions and do a make a ranking from the map. And so what this will do is it'll go in and rank those variables that we just mapped by zip code there. So again, there's our 04015 Casco main there, which might be a good idea to figure out, hey, there's 41% of the households are projected to use organic foods. You might want to try to target that location potentially as a potential spot for our shop. Of course, we want to look at other variables as well. But that's how you would look at that sort of thing. So there you go. It's how you do you simply map to identify potential marketplaces and locations for your organic or natural food store. Hopefully this video helped you. If you need more help, look for the contact link on the business blog. I'm glad to help you anyway. I can't take care and have a great day.