Highlighted among the typical data analyzed in Geomarketing studies, the Flow of People indicates the places where commercial activity is most intense.
Overview
They refer to the regions with the highest concentration of workers, commerce, and service activities in local economies.
These are the places where people tend to interact and spend more time outside their homes.
There is no single approach to arrive at this information, and there is a big difference between the available methodologies.
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Methodology
Mapfry was able to create a version with coverage for the entire Brazilian territory based on the sum of factors indicative of the presence of people.
We can assign volumes of people everywhere where there are a sufficient number of indicators.
The adopted formula provides for weights for different indicators and is calibrated by the importance of a location within the municipality.
Even though there are cases in which the municipality is a flow donor and others in which it is a recipient, such as capitals or regional capitals, the current information points to the area with the highest flow in that municipality.
Our current algorithm does not yet assign a specific number of people to a place, but an intensity that varies between 0 and 1.
This is an active area of research, so we are still developing and improving our methodology for assigning flows of people to locations.
Future developments may detail volume ranges and discriminate characteristics of their audiences.
Update
This approach also allows us to monitor and update estimates more frequently compared to other methodologies based on official sources.
The flow areas are continuously updated in a sampling or specific routine, if there are indications of a more intense change, such as natural disasters or the closure of large employers, such as industries.
Thus, we can understand how these regions evolve over time or are changed because of a crisis.
Why are People Flow areas important?
The areas marked on the map as having high flow are those where we find the highest concentration of people seeking commercial, professional, and educational activities.
Such areas may exert influence beyond the municipal boundaries, even if the markings are in relation to the municipality itself.
For example, a hot area in a small municipality will look the same as a hot area in a major municipality, but its sizes are different.
We chose this approach to privilege opportunities in smaller municipalities, without prejudice to vision in large cities.
Information that is not taken into account by the methodology
These are not real sources of information regarding the location of people, such as those from cell phones, data traffic on antennas, the number of devices connected to Wi-Fi networks, or even vehicle monitoring.
This would be data directly associated with the presence of people, so even if anonymized, they would be subject to personal data protection legislation.
Information from sources such as research RAIS (Annual Social Information Report), which shows the presence of formal workers in the regions, cannot be used for commercial purposes.
As stated in Item 5 of the recommendations:
Use the query tool only to meet your own needs and not to pass on the data from the databases to third parties.
If you find a database that violates this provision, report: estatisticastrabalho@economia.gov.br.
restraints
The People Flow indicator is not available in locations with a population of less than 50,000 inhabitants.
This is due to the displacement of part of the Flow to larger centers.
You can also identify the central regions of these locations from the consultation of Points of Interest, searching for categories such as Pharmacies, Banks, Notaries, Government, which occupy the commercial centers of those locations.
Learn more about the Flow of People