The usual first candidate for 'value engineering' is marketing, as most centre owners are unable to measure its worth and hence it's an easy target for the chop.

Despite my background in marketing, I have a lot of sympathy with this view because, as a generalisation, investment in shopping centre advertising has been haphazard and wasteful.

Few companies give shoppers a strong enough rationale to alter their behaviour. Fewer still carry out pre-campaign research.

But advertising does work. Look at Morrison's like-for-like sales improvements on the back of a 'well received' advertising campaign - up 4 per cent.

If you want to win your fight for funding I suggest that you have to make your case forcefully.

Identify the aspects of your centre which set you apart, get your agency to develop a raft of options to communicate them and subject them to qualitative research. Develop the winner into a medium which gives you most value - probably direct marketing and probably not TV- and test the final execution with a survey.

Set out your objectives clearly to demonstrate the commercial impact of your campaign and thus justify the investment that you seek - then measure and report its impact.

Fight the good fight!

And happy New Year!

Stephen Logue, chairman, Business Blueprints

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