Gregory Schreiber

The increasing pressures throughout the retail environment have resulted in many chain retailers and commercial developers turning to complex methods of understanding who their customers are and where they live. As power centres are the most popular retail supply channel, it is of great use and importance to understand who shops at which power centre and where are they coming from. This paper explores what research has been done in this field, and provides the methods of how consumer profiling of each power centre location in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) has been conducted. The methods are divided into three separate sections: market segmentation using multivariate cluster analysis of different types, retail centre classification using conventional methods, and trade area generation using a combination of deterministic and probabilistic theories to best utilise the census, commercial structure, and transportation survey data. This approach involves further analysis through the combination of these three methods to profile the differences in patrons of various power centre types, which captures the focus of this research paper, while profiling patrons of super regional malls for comparative purposes. The results indicate that consumers do have distinct preferences between different centres, and this facilitates further understanding of what factors affect draw of different consumers from one type to the next. The results also provide the foundations of further research of how the consumer market may change in the coming decades in the GTA, based on new retail innovations currently breaking ground and how their traits and location now might determine their future customer base tomorrow.