The French have given us Château Pétrus, foie gras and the Statue of Liberty. Now the French are adding business intelligence solutions to their list of contributions to American culture. Asterop hopes American retailers take to its demographic and consumer behavioral datasets like the Yanks have done to French gourmet chefs.

Across Europe, Asterop has helped retailers find customers and build stores where the target customer is by refining development strategies and optimizing operations through analytics, says founder and CEO Christophe Girardier.

Asterop’s U.S. clients – many of which were acquired when the company bought Market Insite Group in 2005 – include Apple, AnnTaylor, Bare Escentuals, Coach and Crate & Barrel. Through Asterop’s GeoIntelligence software, operators have been able to map, model, simulate and visualize future stores using statistical modeling techniques.

The GeoIntelligence solution provides localized estimates of sales expenditure by retail category, as well as an innovative consumer segmentation system that delivers an accurate picture of consumer buying behaviors and retail sales potential in local markets.

The company says GeoIntelligence enables retailers to discover untapped retail potential while designing more successful store network expansion strategies and in-store product mixes.

U.S. revenue potential
A recent Asterop survey analyzing consumer segmentation, demographics and expenditure data indicates that there is nearly $250 billion in untapped revenue across the United States. In the technology goods sector, Riverside, Calif., represents $1 billion in revenue potential; in apparel markets, Detroit has $918 million in untapped revenue; and in sporting goods, New York offers $3 billion in untapped revenue.

“There is big hidden potential,” Girardier says. “Retailers still use very old information [to make decisions]. Our vision, our strategy is to use the data to drive this.”

Girardier says retailers closely analyze in-store profitability, but not necessarily the store’s bricks-and-mortar price or the space price. “But including the price of the space in the space price is very important as a contribution of the revenue of a store.”

Asterop COO Bryan Vais says American retailers “understand we represent a very scientific, objective approach to solving these problems of understanding retail markets and the performance of retailers in these markets. They also appreciate the fact that our models were designed and architected from the beginning to be completely generic to any market.”

Market Insite Group’s client list, web-based solutions and team of experts in the retail and real estate sectors gave Asterop the jump start it needed to hit the U.S. market running. In October 2007, Asterop announced a business intelligence (BI) dataset that contains newly modeled demographics, localized estimates of sales expenditure by retail category and an innovative consumer segmentation system, delivering an accurate picture of consumer buying behaviors and retail sales potential in local markets.

“We think that there’s really a very good understanding now with the U.S. customers that have decided to go with us about this,” Vais says, “and we feel that the snowball will start to build once we’ve completed more projects with American customers.”