Brett Hermann

Over the past 5 years, Canada’s largest entertainment company Cineplex, has been collecting information from their patrons in the form of a joint loyalty program with Scotiabank called SCENE. This major research project will make use of the SCENE loyalty data in order to determine movie-going behaviours for two different Canadian Census Metropolitan Areas. The purpose of investigating patron movie-going behaviour across two different urban landscapes is to determine if any evidence can be found that resembles the main assumptions of Christaller’s Central Place Theory. Some of these assumptions include that the physical landscape should have no variation in its physical character, transportation facilities, or productive capacity and the rational consumer will patronize the nearest location to them to minimize their costs. By investigating the density of SCENE members that visit their most visited theatre it was found that majority of patrons tend to visit the theatre closest to where they live in Toronto; however, this is not the case for Vancouver due to its inconsistency with many central place theory assumptions. With respect to testing movie-going behaviours by extracting SCENE members using the Thiessen polygon technique, patterns in Toronto show that patron crossover occurs mostly for neighbouring locations to their actual closest location, while in Vancouver crossover is significantly more spread out across all other locations in the study area. Overall, it was found that SCENE members crossover to theatres that have more operas, shows, premium visits, and its proximity to all other theatres. The importance of these findings is factored into the Huff Model as weighted attractiveness values. The result of the model shows the probabilistic theoretical trade boundaries for each location for both Toronto and Vancouver study areas.