Skip to Main Content

BUS 280: Entrepreneurship

Who's your target market? Locate demographics & statistics

The type of business or service that will succeed in any given city or province depends on the area’s demographics and the competition. A first step is to check out the data on population, housing, and income … the type of information which is collected by Statistics Canada and BC Stats.

Census Canada

Census Canada is the primary source of sociodemographic information on Canadians.

Census data allows you to locate information about small groups of our population. A few options might be:

  • By geography; 2021 Focus on Geography series; you can drill down to the city (the city of Victoria) or CMA (Census Metropolitan Area of Victoria
    • When looking for information about Victoria, consider whether it is the City of Victoria or the Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) that you should research.

    • The City of Victoria is considered a census subdivision area as are the other municipalities in our area e.g., Sooke, Saanich, View Royal, etc.

    • CMA for Victoria = includes the City of Victoria, Saanich, Esquimalt, Sidney, the District of Sooke, and more. See this map for more details.
       
  • By place of work; 2016 Census for Place of Work status in Victoria (this data not yet released for 2021)
  • By housing, education, age & gender, etc.; Data tables, 2021 Census

GeoSearch

GeoSearch is an interactive mapping app that makes it easy to find geographic areas in Canada for which census data are available. Below is Victoria CMA but as you can see on the left column you can also retrieve Census divisions, subdivisions, etc.

map of Victoria census data

 

Canadian markets (cluster or psychographic segmentation)