Making The Most of Your Natural Assets

While all shopping centres 'do' marketing, printing leaflets, advertising, networking with local media and organizing events and promotions, very few spend time making the most of their natural assets, the retailers within their centre. That's an opportunity missed, according to Toolbox Marketing, a UK-based firm specializing in retail and shopping centre marketing. It believes that a proactive tenant relations program can reap huge rewards, to the benefit of landlords, centres, retailers and an ever-increasing band of grateful shoppers.

"In the current economic climate, such a natural asset should never be ignored. Clients need to maximize use of their marketing spend and get as much clout for their coinage as they possibly can. Retailers reflect a hugely valuable, and often untapped, resource," said Kim Bithel, account director.

One centre that recently benefited from that strategy is The Brunswick in central London, UK.

A relatively small consumer event took on big proportions this past summer when the centre amassed goody bags worth £33,375, an amount that reflected an increase of over 400 percent on the total event spend.

Dubbed 'Me.Me.Me.', the event took place on the evening of July 10 and transformed The Brunswick into a mecca for fashion and beauty to raise consumer awareness of the centre's full retail mix.

The majority of the items given away were from centre retailers, ranging from £5 vouchers to sophisticated beauty products.

Lisa Skilton, a Toolbox Marketing executive in charge of the retailer relations program at The Brunswick, found her initial chats to tenants produced immediate rewards. "The vast majority of the 35 stores in the centre were able to commit immediately, whether it was by donating items for the goody bags, contributing resources to the event or agreeing to run their own concurrent activity. It obviously helps that I know each of the retailers well, having spent a year working on this account already, but I am always surprised by how generous and supportive the retailers are to events that we run in-centre. I think they appreciate the fact that we are all aiming for the same thing, namely contented shoppers who keep coming back to The Brunswick."

An additional benefit gleaned from an easy communication existing between marketing agency and retailer is, as Skilton explains, "We can often tie our event planning in to a specific promotion that one of the retailers is conducting, most likely at the head office level. The Brunswick event, for instance, connected well with a Shunburn campaign that Superdrug was rolling out nationally at the time. We benefited enormously from the promotional items and publicity that the company was able to commit to our local centre event and Superdrug was grateful for the opportunity to take its promotion to an even wider audience."

As well as taking advantage of these national head office campaigns, Toolbox Marketing also looked beyond the centre itself for contributors to the event. 'The Brunswick is in central London but it's slightly set back from the road and is in many ways a hidden treasure in need of discovery," Bithel noted. "It was important for us to involve as many local businesses as we could who weren't in direct competition with our retailers, but who were offering services complimentary to our event." Thus it was that shoppers found Elemis treatment vouchers, Cannons gym memberships, Eastman Dental treatment vouchers and Pilates sessions tucked within their Brunswick-branded goody bags.

"Shoppers really appreciated the goody bags and I've been inundated with requests from both retailers and consumers as to when the next Brunswick event is going to be staged," said centre manager, David Plumb. "As a promotional event, it really could not have gone better. To have achieved that on a limited budget was phenomenal."

The Brunswick handed out its 250 goody bags in just 45 minutes and, according to Bithel, and an additional 519 people signed up wanting future information of events.

Retailer feedback from the event was equally positive. A marked upturn in traffic was allied with comments such as 'sales were up £1,000', 'one of our busiest ever days—great!', 'we cleared nearly all our sale stock' and, most telling of all 'please, please, please can we be more involved in the next event!'.

Happy retailers such as these make life easier for centre management teams and can help make marketing budgets stretch significantly further. A recent fashion show at the Haymarket shopping center in Leicester was supported by retailers to the tune of donating clothes worth £3,350 and prizes worth £500.

And it is not just at the larger events such as these that shopping centres can benefit from the retailer relations programs like he ones Toolbox Marketing develops and manages. The Swan Centre's Halloween pumpkin-carving workshops, for example, can be run on a tight budget thanks to pumpkins donated by Tesco and candles by Robert Dyas. The Haymarket's 'Design a T-shirt' workshop has T-shirts donated by Primark for its canvases; and Culver Square's Back to School Trails are supported by an enthusiastic team at Build-A-Bear, which freely provides plush bears, mascots and bonhomie.

Bithel is adamant that retailers are indeed the hidden assets of any shopping centre and deserve to be taken care of. 'In times of economic stress such as now, when consumers are busy tightening their belts, it is imperative that shopping centres make full use of their natural assets to get maximum benefit from their marketing spend. By engaging retailers and encouraging them to become an integral part of your promotional campaigns, it is possible to maximize your marketing budget. And that, in this day and age, is exactly what's needed'.

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