Shopping malls look to events to attract clients

Organizing events in shopping centers, such as celebrating the “birthday” of the Riwiera mall in Gdynia, may increase footfall in some stores even two or three-fold and, according to a report by Cherry Business Performance Management. Overall, the footfall for the entire mall increased by 22 percent compared to the corresponding period of last month. Youth fashion brands saw the highest increase in footfall, of up to 262 percent, while the mall’s drug store was visited by 286 percent more clients than in the same period last year. The dwell time of the center’s customers also increased during the study period (36 percent more clients spent between 3 and 3.5 hours in the mall). The study also showed that 16 percent of clients returned to the shopping center within a month of the event. The firm used its indoor tracking system, which analyzed data from mobile phones connecting to the mall’s wifi network to find out the dwell time as well as the most frequented pathways of the clients. “Until now, property managers did not have such information at their disposal and management was based mainly on simple footfall figures, experience and expertise or on market research. What used to constitute a success was attracting several ‘cash cows’ to the center, i.e. large and popular brands,” said Paweł Henke, CEO of Cherry BPM.