Expanding communications
In the past five years, the communication audiences of shopping centers have increased significantly, adds Schukhina. It is now not only federal tenants and catering, but also local business and the media, including the specialized one. Besides, the chain also consists of all sorts of communities from house chats to associations of car enthusiasts.
“2022 is the year of the buyer in the marketing of shopping centres as the vacancy of 1.5 mln m2, the empty floor left by departed foreign brands, must be filled in, so shopping malls are fighting for the attention of home-grown tenants in highly-sought categories. Who is the winner? Not only big federal malls with large budgets. Those objects which take care of their image, develop their product and services also are,” explains Schukina.
Head of Marketing with Metropolis (MTK M2), Elena Kokeladze highlights the interest form shopping centres for supporting Russian brands.
Metropolis is about to launch a project called .RU to help local fashion brands which are not yet presented in the shopping centre for whatever reason. “We see our role in creating a platform for the brands, landlords and fashion experts to communicate. The local fashion brands which patriciate are our potential tenants, but we started interacting with them on a marketing basis first of all,” explains Kokeladze.
.
What shopping centres research
The research carried out now by shopping centres these days has become more complex. We can see that finally they have started measuring NPS (Net Promoter Score) and are slowly moving away from a practice of collecting 20 feedback questionaries after an event and calling that research,” tells us Schukina.
Those with a systematic marketing approach are now conducting classical marketing research which they have been postponing since 2020, explains the expert.
“Since the summer, we have seen an increase in demand for more quality-based methods such as focus groups and depth interviews. Why? When a mall thinks of changing its targeting, concept or name, they must make a solid decision before they start a rebranding process. There are no fortune tellers in the teams and nobody has this boundless confidence in the vision of managers or owners any more, as it is now more important to consider a scope of opinions, different points of views and the voice of the customer,” continues Schukina.
At the same time, she says that the era of CLIM and mapping customer experience is over. Marketing teams, once having paid to experts and consultants for very expensive research have analyzed the methods in detail and are now reviving the maps of challenging touchpoints and growth points on their own.
As for Metropolis Shopping Center, we mostly are into studying the traffic: how the information affects it and the changes about seasonal and other common factors. We also dig into various communication channels as most old ones do not work or have ceased to exist,” explains Kokeladze.
.