Dr. Location

WORK ENVIRONMENT: Retailers have hired Grant Thrall to calculate where their competitors are considering building in an effort to beat them to the next hot spot.

Thrall, 58, a professor at the University of Florida, is one of the founding fathers of a burgeoning field known as business geography. Business geography begins with the raw materials of traditional demographics and the more detailed field of psychographics, which carves the populace into as many as 65 slivers considerably more precise than broad age and income categories like "25-34" or "$20,000 to $40,000." In the parlance of psychographics, the "7B" who just walked by is a "young, frequent mover," a category encompassing young, white, low-earning males who move a lot -- often from one mobile home to another. Business geographers integrate the psychographic data with geographic information systems (GIS) software, a high-tech marriage of spreadsheets and maps, to produce remarkably specific pictures of economic behavior, from statewide to regional to local to neighborhood.

Retailers, homebuilders and other industries can learn precisely who their customers are -- for example, whether they're appealing to "young, frequent movers" or the "laptops and lattes" psychographic -- affluent singles renting in major metro areas. Old categories like race, age and income don't matter much, says Thrall. A daycare chain, for example, may want to locate in places where young, working-class families live. "We don't care about things like race anymore," he says. "You take a black yuppie or a white yuppie and they're both going to be driving a BMW."

For business geographers, noodling the psychographics and demographics is just the first step in helping companies figure out where they should -- or shouldn't -- locate to attract those customers. How far are a video store's customers willing to drive? Is a bank more likely to attract customers if it's in a shopping center that also has a grocery?

The data is specific down to the ZIP-plus-four -- almost individual home -- level and incorporates layers of other information. A business choosing, for example, among three potential sites can order up maps that show for each: Zoning; average home sale prices and volumes; the soils, watersheds and flood zones; the land-pricing levels; existing traffic counts as well as future planned highway improvements; and even the quality of the schools.

Geospatial tools allow franchise companies to calculate whether a new location would cannibalize an existing one. They also help companies figure out their competitors: Thrall has been hired by Florida restaurant chains to "reverse-engineer" competitors' location patterns in an effort to try to beat them to the next hot spot.

The field isn't just a tool for retail chains and corporate giants. Even small companies are turning to business geography to help figure out where to open stores -- or which ones to close in a downturn. "They either hire me now, or they hire me later," says Thrall. One of Thrall's former graduate students, Paul Amos, is managing director of the Wharton Geospatial Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, where he says he is helping spread Thrall's gospel to business students. "It's a way to help businesses make better decisions," says Amos. "To minimize risk on one hand and increase profitability on the other."

Thrall traces his interest in the field to his mother. In the 1960s, she was one of the first women executives to climb the ranks at General Electric on the West Coast. She was a marketing director responsible for making sure GE's retailers didn't locate too closely to one another. She tapped her high school son to help her pore over maps and databases in the evenings. "If there was such a thing as business geography when I went to college, I would have majored in it," says Thrall. There wasn't. But he came up with the next best thing: Following a master's degree in economics, Thrall earned a Ph.D. in geography and economics from the department of geography at Ohio State University.

Many geography departments were once found in business schools, which began to slough them off to liberal arts colleges in the 1950s. Thrall has always been a bit of an outsider in UF's geography department; one administrator there derided his 2002 book, "Business Geography and New Real Estate Market Analysis," as "unintellectual." Thrall figures he will have the last laugh. He's made enough money in real estate investments and consulting that he lives in a mini-mansion in a Gainesville neighborhood that is home to more of the university's coaches than its professors.

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