The Paisley Centre's Week on Wheels promotion has already won international acclaim and last year the decision was made to repeat the event - with even more success.

The format is extremely simple: seven people start the week living in a car parked in the mall. They have to perform various tasks and each day one is evicted until at the end of the week there is one survivor, who gets to keep the car.

The joint promotion with a local radio station cost the centre less than £10,000 but it generated 2,500 on-air mentions of the centre, with an impressive advertising value of £18,000. The voting process attracted 36,000 votes, 11,000 of them in the final 24 hours, and consumer research showed that 57 per cent of shoppers had heard of the promotion.

The result was an 11.21 per cent increase in footfall during the promotion period, at a time when national figures were down by about 3 per cent.

After such a resounding success, many retailers at the Paisley Centre are extremely keen to see it repeated. As a result, the Week on Wheels promotion is likely to become a regular annual event.

Cranberry: Short Term Merchant of the Year, sponsored by Retail Profile Europe

Cranberry sells dried fruit, nuts and chocolate, and unusually for an RMU trader it is a completely self-service concept.

Cranberry's founder, Saeid Pour, started by basing the business in railway stations, but after a successful trial at Whiteleys in Bayswater, London, in 2003 it has now become a popular attraction in numerous shopping centres.

The key elements to Cranberry's success are high quality produce and a great selection, with over 100 different products for consumers to choose from. Significantly, most shoppers view Cranberry's products (apart from the chocolate) as nutritious and an attractively healthy alternative to traditional snacks.

Cranberry's offer has proved to be the perfect impulse purchase, because most customers simply cannot resist stopping at the tempting self-serve units and making a selection. Some buy a wide range of products to take home, while others just purchase a small amount, which they can then munch on as they browse and shop.

There always seems to be a lot of buzz around a Cranberry unit, which naturally means that they're as popular with centre managers as they are with shoppers.

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