RETAIL
BY JONATHAN SMITH
The Secrect Behind Perfect Shopping Centres
It’s all in the strategy
C
reating an exceptional shopping centre
requires retail landlords to implement
strategies across four categories of
innovation in order to encourage patrons to remain in
their centres as long as possible during each visit and to
increase their spend.
Successfully implementing these strategies results
in the creation of exceptional retail centres, capable of
attracting a continued or constant flow of visitors and
shoppers which identify the centre as their home-awayfrom-home, whilst also deriving extensive capital gain
for the owner.
The four categories of innovation are: (1) matching
the needs of the target community; (2) meeting the
needs of a diverse shopper spectrum which encourages
all the members of a family to visit your retail centre;
(3) creating an attractive and inviting shopper-tainment
environment which retains shoppers; (4) ensuring that
the centre is both clean and safe for shoppers.
(1) Matching the needs of the target community
Shoppers should best be simply categorised by
wealth level and age. There may well be other ways to
categorise shoppers but the most important aspects
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Commercial Handbook 2013
which determine their respective spending capacity
and patterns are wealth and age levels.
Thus, creating an exceptional shopping centre means
knowing who your typical shopper profile is likely to
be from both a wealth level and age perspective: this
requires surveying the target area of your centre and
determining their spending patterns in so doing.
Creating the correct tenant mix of a shopping centre
is of fundamental importance to its success. There are
a number of assumptions which some landlords make,
however, that may be incorrect.
The correct tenant mix arises through matching
the profile of a centre’s target market: this means
establishing the profile of a centre’s target population
during a few steps.
• etermining the optimal catchment area
D
(geographical nodes) from which the subject shopping
centre shall attract patrons (shoppers): it is important
to note that the optimal catchment area will be
determined by factors such as proximity to competing
centres as well as geographical constraints (including
rivers, mountains and traffic patterns).
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