Alex G. Istanboulian

Marketing to ethnic niche market is of great importance to the success of retailers and service providers due to accelerated global immigration and increasing ethnic diversity in many metropolitan areas. This study aims to develop a marketing model for Bell Canada using spatial analysis to identify under and well areas when marketing to the Chinese community, the largest recent immigrant group in Toronto and to establish Bell retail presence within those areas. The data used in the research include primary survey data from a mall traffic study and 2001 census data from Statistics Canada. The primary data collected include data on consumer shopping patterns when utilizing telecom stores, billboard advertising points, and Chinese points of interest and telecom store locations in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA). Location quotient, Thiessen polygon and correlation analysis were used to analyze the data to identify the relative concentration of Chinese consumers and the telecom stores and their spatial relationships. The areas of expansion for new Bell World Store locations are identified at the Agincourt Mall and the Mandarin Shopping Centre. To provide marketing support to the new stores, optimal advertising billboards locations are determined. Furthermore, stores dynamics are determined in order to provide the most economical ways to decrease store input costsand increase customers. The results of the study contribute to the existing literature on marketing to immigrant consumers. This study provides methodological implications in the usage of primary and secondary data in the spatial analysis of ethnic marketing, identifying niche markets and the identification of market gaps for those ethnic markets.