Credit crunch Christmas
Published: 07 February, 2009
Centres across the UK have been looking for ways of cutting the cost of Christmas 2009 without losing the essential sparkle. Graham Parker investigates some economical options
The credit crunch may be affecting people’s choices of grottos and lighting but for one centre, the downturn has inspired a more community based approach to ensure nobody lost out last Christmas. At Saxon Square Shopping Centre in Christchurch, Dorset, the grotto this year was offered free to the public, thanks to the support of community groups, tenants and strong support of the landlord.
The grotto was open at Saxon Square for the final weekend and the week leading up to Christmas and was manned by a team of volunteers from a local church. The centre’s landlord allowed the use of a vacant unit and ensured that marketing material was distributed throughout the centre to raise awareness of the scheme. As a result, over 24 families an hour visited the grotto while it was on site.
Centre manager, Bryan Taylor, says the economical climate prompted a more creative use of resources. “This strategy was born out of necessity. As many centre managers in charge of smaller schemes will agree, when you have a small marketing budget you have to be creative in the way in which you use it.”
And at the Hildreds centre in Skegness the management team has long made a virtue of necessity and built their own Christmas decorations. So successful have they become that they are even selling displays to other centres.
“This year’s Christmas displays and the Santa’s grotto were the most popular yet,” says deputy centre manager Steve Andrews. “65 per cent of visitors seeing Santa were from outside of our catchment area, with the furthest coming from Canada.”
The Canadians had been visiting family in Nottingham, who recommended the Hildreds as the place to go if they wanted to experience a traditional Christmas while they were in the UK.
Andrews makes all of the displays himself out of polystyrene, hand carved with a wire brush and then covered in cement to give them a hard coat. They are then hand painted to finish. “They are very popular and every one’s a one-off,” he says.
The displays this year were based upon three lands: the grotto was based upon Alice in Wonderland with Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, the March Hare and Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, the White Rabbit and the Cheshire cat. Visitors could pass through a rabbit hole and into Wonderland, walk across a giant chess board and visit Santa in his enchanted Christmas Tree Grotto that was covered in heart, diamond, club and spade symbols.
The Hildreds Centre offers a traditional Christmas.
The next display was the Land of Narnia and this showed a typical snow scene along with Aslan the Lion, the wicked Snow Queen and an animated white fur-covered Santa who read the Chronicles of Narnia to his visitors.
The final display was the Land of Oz and this showed the cowardly lion, the brainless scarecrow and the loveable tin man alongside a 7ft-tall animated snowman who danced a merry jig.
And for Andrews, Christmas is turning into a lucrative sideline. “I have sold several displays to other centres this year and have received good feedback from the centre managers about how well received they were by their customers,” he says.
Queensmere Observatory in Slough, owned and managed by Criterion Capital, also kept a firm eye on the bottom line when it launched two very clever marketing schemes to help drive footfall and increase spend with retailers over the Christmas period.
The first scheme was the Christmas grotto, launched on November 20 to coincide with the Christmas light switch on event. The grotto was marketed as free for a family of up to three children and two adults. All visitors had to do was present £50 of receipts from the retailers within the centre and between the opening day and Christmas Eve, over 5,000 visitors passed through the grotto doors into Santa’s magic kingdom. The receipts produced showed the grotto had generated £260,750 of spend with the centre’s retailers.
And on December 18 QueensmereObservatory opened a temporary ice rink in the centre’s Town Square, which worked along the same principles as the grotto. For a family of up to three children and two adults to use the rink for up to 20 minutes, £30 of receipts from the centre or the high street needed to be presented. The rink was open every day until January 4, with receipts totalling £422,730.
Centre director Paul Clifford says: “This was the first time we’d tried something like this at QueensmereObservatory. We wanted to give the retailers a helping hand at clawing back some of the losses the whole of the retail industry saw in the months prior to Christmas. As well as encouraging visitors to the centre initially, it also gave retailers the opportunity to up-sell for free entry the attractions.”
And there was also positive spin-off for the centre as a whole: year-on-year the footfall figures for December 2008 were only marginally down on December 2007, but month-on-month they showed a 45 per cent increase on November.
“Naturally, we can’t know whether this was all due to the attractions or exactly how much more was spent because of the grotto and the ice rink,” Clifford accepts, “but with the total expenditure for the two attractions amounting to almost £750,000 and the feedback from the centres retailers all being very positive, it’s certainly something we will be discussing with our marketing team for this year.”
