Brands wake up to the power of the mall
Published: 25 January, 2012
New research reveals brand attitudes towards UK shopping centre. Big brands are looking to use shopping centre promotional activity in order to target “picky” consumers left feeling the pinch in the current economic climate, according to recent research findings published by out-of-home media owner, Brandspace.
The study was presented at the Shopping Centre Marketing Seminar at the Emirates Stadium in October and published in full last month. Having polled some 400 UK brand managers and media buyers, Brandspace claims the study represents a new outlook on the retail industry, and gives shopping centre operators additional insight into the buying habits of brands.
“From the point of view of a shopping centre, engaging with brands and understanding their buying instincts had tended to be a one way street and we haven’t asked brands why they use shopping malls for their promotional activity,” says Brandspace CEO, Paul Soanes. “The purpose of the report was to create a two way dialogue in order to help us talk to brands.”
The findings show that shopping centres are seen as a powerful channel for experiential campaigns with not one respondent ruling out shopping centres as a venue for promotional activity in the next twelve months – but there are still things that brands would like to change including the provision of more sophisticated data and visitor profiling.
“Brands see shopping malls as a safe way to promote but that’s not to say malls shouldn’t do more,” says Soanes. “A centre might provide data on how many female customers it has compared to men or the proportion of ABC1s, but that’s not enough,” he says. “The data needs to be more specific - we use CACI, TGI, and others to give a more bespoke answer, providing brands with a mean profile of the centre visitors. We might say, ‘This shopping centre has X amount of visitors and 20 per cent are likely to be targets of the campaign Vs the mean average for the country’.
“For shopping centres to increase the number of interesting brands coming in they need to invest in subscribing to these resources.”
And there are other things brands would like to change in their dealings with shopping centres: 40 per cent would like a larger space on the mall and 30 per cent would like to do reciprocal deals with local, relevant retailers or the venue itself, or joint promotions. Sixty-five per cent would like an amplified presence during a campaign including PR support from the venue, and the possibility of promotion online and in other mall-owned media outlets. All indications show that if such media was made available at the time of booking space, brands would make use of it.
Price (50 per cent of respondents would prefer lower cost options) and reduced red tape and site restrictions were other major considerations. The report also shows that shopping centres are seen to be one of the best venues for challenging consumer perception, with brands scoring them 4/5 in terms of effectiveness.
Soanes gives a famous campaign by Lipton tea as an example. Before the campaign the majority of people – Soanes thinks it may have been as much as 85 per cent – said they didn’t like Lipton even though they hadn’t tried it.
“The results of the promotion were extraordinary,” says Soanes. “There was a complete turnaround with 85 per cent of people saying they liked the taste of Lipton tea following the campaign. More and more brands are realising that shopping centres are a good way to get the public to sample or understand complex products.”
“There is a lot of negativity concerning consumer retail activity at the moment, but on the other hand there is wholesale recognition of what shopping centres provide in terms of generating brand advocacy,” he adds. “What this study reveals is that brands see these environments as very powerful channels through which to reach their target consumer groups, who are facing increasingly difficult economic circumstances.”
The report is available in full at www.brandspace.com
