Welcome Aboard the Info Pod

Interactive technology sparks marketing innovation

Necessity is the mother of all invention. The old proverb couldn’t be more relevant than in this technology-infused era. New technologies are being introduced daily, effectively reinventing the rules for shopping centre marketers, regardless of their property’s size, location or brand positioning. But as with anything in business, focusing on human interaction—not technology—will lead to long-term success.

The Arcade at Cyberport is a techno-marketer’s dream. Built to act as a town center of sorts for the Hong Kong government’s ambitious new Cyberport digital city, which is home to a cluster of more than 100 technology companies and their 10,000 employees, The Arcade launched this past April with a  mission to “combine advanced technology with showcase retail, entertainment, dining and exhibitions in a single interface.”
Everywhere you look, there’s an out-of-this world installation waiting to be discovered, like the Media Orb video sculpture whose multiple screens deliver a shopper experience like no other. But while The Arcade’s features can be viewed as sheer demonstrations of technological advance, the site is very much about people—just tech-ready and savvy people.
This past July, The Arcade hosted the Cyberport Games Marathon, an event designed to introduce games developed by local companies to the general public and promote a positive and healthy gaming culture in Hong Kong. An interactive and computer arts gallery, a video concert, a games-training session and a power-game challenge for teens were among the elements forming a dizzying array of free high-tech activities. The Arcade provided complimentary shuttle bus and ferry service for its event, whose draw to win a helicopter ride over Cyberport made it that much more compelling.
Beyond the eye-popping extravaganza, though, the focus was decidedly on the community and the need for very contemporary consumers, especially young ones, to find a welcoming meeting place where they could learn and be entertained alongside other like-minded people. And that’s what technology-based marketing is truly about.
After a century that brought them from a sedentary state to the edge of globalisation, consumers entered the new Millennium with more knowledge, marketing savvy and power than they’d ever had before. With technology as their master access code, consumers took control of their retail environment, both on-site and online, prompting marketers to pay close attention to their needs, desires and lifestyles.
Today, technology serves two retail purposes: figuring what consumers need or want, and then supporting marketing initiatives that meet those needs. Some technologies primarily support one function or the other, but, more often than not, marketing technology allows professionals to do both—think of opt-in shopping centre newsletter programmes that require participants to share information about themselves (e.g. contact details, shopping habits, favourite retail categories and stores) so that they can later receive the news they seek, be it the latest fashion styles or the week’s discount offers.
Carefully planning technology-based marketing initiatives can lead to a closer relationship with customers, better sales productivity and the long-term success of a scheme. Just ask the marketers of St. Elli Shopping Centre, whose ingenuity meant narrowly escaping a grim Christmas last year.
With a total marketing budget of just £28,050 (41,000 EUR), the small centre in Llanelli, Wales, had little means to battle competition from new nearby retail parks and larger surrounding towns. Given declining footfall and spend levels from a clientele with modest means, St. Elli’s managing agent, Nelson Bakewell, was considering abandoning the centre’s Santa Grotto. Plans changed, however, when centre management used technology to keep with its tradition of building loyalty and profits through community focus.
“Child safety is always an emotive subject. With increasing fears of litigation in the market and a media hungry for controversy, St. Elli’s management came up with the simplest possible idea: a security camera inside Santa’s grotto,” the centre explained in its 2005 ICSC Maxi Award submission.
“With the UK public already very familiar with security camera surveillance, the hope was that the majority of shoppers would view this new feature as a sensible development to ensure both the safety of the child but also the safety of Santa from any false accusations from litigious parents.”
With the Grotto-Cam donated by a tenant, St. Elli only paid £120 (175 EUR) for the installation before relying on its strong rapport with the local media to launch its own in-house (read free) PR campaign to increase the grotto’s productivity.
The first steps were to issue a press release and then take the local newspaper editor to a nearby pub for an initial, friendly briefing. Within a day, a strong feature was published in the newspaper. Further media contacts gave the story enough momentum to receive national coverage in the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and Women’s Own magazine, as well as international coverage in the New York Times. The story also surfaced on two key TV channels, BBC Wales and ITV Wales, while radio coverage as far afield as Radio Paris in France only brought more notoriety to the centre.
Consumers got St. Elli’s message, pushing grotto usage up from 740 visits in 2003 to 1,230 one year later. Footfall during December also increased by 5.6 percent—this, in contrast to a national drop of four percent.
These day,  such a programme might be regarded as so basic from a technological standpoint that it would hardly be newsworthy. However, the response that St. Elli got for its initiative leads to a different conclusion. It makes perfect sense that such a minute investment of funds for a technology-based scheme would have such an impact on the centre’s trading and clientele. St. Elli succeeded because it addressed the underlying consumer need that could be fulfilled by a tech-based marketing initiative: the need for safety.
Likewise, technology company G1 Ltd. used its expertise and understanding of the marketplace to elaborate a new CCTV security camera plan for the historic Covent Garden in London. The project would not only give the market 24 new state-of-the-art cameras, it would fulfill the community’s need to feel secure and at home in the scheme. That means using cameras that can be housed in heritage-style domes to emulate the area’s Victorian inspired street lights and position them either discretely overhead and out-of-sight, or on historic and replica lamp columns.
Programmes like these work because they go beyond the often short-lived effect of technology novelty. Consumers have not gotten to the point where they are unmoved by technological innovation—success stories such as Apple’s iPod suggests otherwise. However,  consumers are so used to discovering, experiencing and anticipating new technologies that the introduction of a tech-based programme in a shopping centre may not be enough to move them to visit and shop regularly.
A much more effective approach to technology planning is to focus on a shopping centre’s mission statement and the primary consumer needs it has vowed to fulfill (e.g. convenience, community nurturing, service, luxury experience) before identifying which technologies can assist the centre in fulfilling its mission over the long term.
One model that offers a workable framework for technology-based marketing is Abraham Maslow’s good old Hierarchy of Needs.
This hierarchy identifies five levels of needs: Psychological (e.g. air, water, food, sleep, sex), Safety, Love, Esteem (self-esteem and recognition from others) and Self-Actualization (e.g. knowledge, peace, self-fulfillment and spirituality). Maslow’s theory assumes that human beings move, in order, from one stage to another, with the most privileged set having more opportunities to access and fulfill higher level needs than those people whose lives are “stuck” in lower levels, struggling to meet their needs because of such conditions as poverty, family dysfunction and insecurity.
Without perpetuating the age-old stereotype of consumer manipulation, shopping centre marketers do have an opportunity to use technology to offer their customers tools and an environment in which they can scale Maslow’s pyramid right up to self-actualization. Marketers have been doing it for years—just think of marketing programmes based on patriotism, family relations, the pursuit of better health and wellness. Technology helps those same marketers answer the needs of a wider set of customers, often quicker and more cost-effectively.
This past February, Canada’s West Edmonton Mall (WEM) and adjacent Fantasyland Hotel introduced a new scheme that allowed shoppers and tenants to stay connected to home, friends, work and their favourite retailers:  WEMiSphere.
For approximately £5 a day (or 7.30 EUR), the scheme offers wireless, high speed Internet access from all areas of the hotel and in specific mall locations, including both food courts, Café Europa, Bourbon Street and World Waterpark. Guests can purchase access codes using their hotel guest phone or from WEM’s guest services centre, visitor information centre, participating retailers and any of the mall’s attraction ticketing and admissions locations.
“The benefits of wireless access throughout WEM are boundless, whether shoppers use it to find the best sales, locate destinations, comparison shop in real time, or for merchants to use to manage their businesses,” said Tom Racca, VP of marketing at Chantry Networks Corporation, the technology company that helped the partners create WEMiSphere.
WEM and Fantasyland are also working with JiWire.com to promote WEMiSphere to the millions of consumers who use JiWire services. The company’s Hotspot Advantage programme directs local consumers who are looking for Wi-Fi zones in the city of Edmonton to WEMiSphere. The scheme even has its own branded Website, at WEMiSphere.com.
The Plaza on Oxford Street in London also recently took its own ‘funky” technology path when it became the first shopping centre in the UK to install Flasma, a floor-set, 40-inch flat LCD television screen designed to display advertisements and provide information and directions to shoppers. Holmes Place, Medicentre and Uniglo are advertisers currently trialing the medium at The Plaza.
According to Bryony Parkin, marketing consultant for The Plaza’s managing agent, Savills, Flasma effectively adds a new dimension to a property’s in house media portfolio.
“Space for promotional activity in shopping centres has a value, as the wall space is taken up with store fronts. Flasma provides an interesting new, cost-effective marketing medium for retailers in the centre,” she notes. “ [It] can also be strategically placed according to where the highest footfall is, and can be used for a number of purposes, potentially making it a very powerful medium.”
Of course, Flasma ensure its clients that its floor screens are water resistant and robust, having been tested using original devices—from driving a three-tonne truck over the screen to endurance testing with yoghurt and various liquids.
Germany’s Bodenschatz company also provides its own line of “walkable media,” illuminated boxes fitted in the floor to house advertisements, information and even guiding systems using collateral material, light animation or video. 
And there are many other ways to engage customers with technology. Loyalty building through technology can be as simple as an online shopping game like the one The Mall Corporation created for its visitors (see brief in the Web Watch section) or centre-hosted blogs, these online journals where Web surfers express their opinions on pretty much anything under the sun. Likewise, Websites and information kiosks, such as the ones Land Securities commissioned from Comgenic, have the power to enhance a shopping centre’s brand, experience and customer service offer.
Having been called to provide marketing and operational software for the Whitefriars scheme in Canterbury, Comgenic quickly zeroed-in on consumer needs before designing and developing a new Website and street-based, touch-screen kiosks for the property.
Comgenic made sure its kiosks were well adapted to their environment, thereby enhancing the customer experience. For one, all kiosks that are to be placed outdoors are designed for that purpose, using screen colours that work in both sunny and dull conditions. The contents of the kiosks also have to be customized to outdoor users’ needs.
“It’s important to understand the audience and recognise that outdoor viewers expect a wider range of information about the [shopping centre’s surrounding] area in general,” said Stuart Ross, Comgenic’s general manager.
With Canterbury being a destination for UK and overseas tourists, the Whitefriars Website and touch-screen kiosks provide information for anyone planning a trip to the area. The kiosks even list retail information in French for the many visitors who cross the channel each year, and one unit is specially designed for disabled persons. The latter features a lower height for wheelchair users and a different resolution to aid the visually impaired.
In doing all of this, Comgenic and Whitefriars avoided the pitfalls of so many other similar installations.
“The shopping world is littered with kiosks that no one uses. These include more than a few shopping centre directory kiosks that make locating a store much more time-consuming than scanning an old-fashioned directory,” notes retail expert Anthony Stokan in his latest book, Naked Consumption—Retail Trends Uncovered. ”It’s only where automating a task genuinely improves the level of service that customers welcome it.”
Acting as a strategic technology partner instead of a straight product supplier, Comgenic equipped Whitefriars with its Comgenic Promote marketing tool, allowing the centre to run and record the effectiveness of targeted campaigns via the Web, kiosks, email and SMS.
Properly designed Websites and kiosks not only fill a customer service purpose, they also produce lucrative income streams for shopping centres.
The info-pods that Screen-FX supplies to shopping centres have a strong commercialisation value and generate non-rental income for landlords from advertising. With a network that reaches more than 330 million customers, ScreenFX installs and manages units that incorporate large-format advertising and touch-screen mall plans for retail properties across the UK, including Westfield’s regional portfolio.
Located in high-traffic areas, the info-pods feature two 63-inch plasma screens mounted back-to-back overhead with interactive touch-screens at waist level. The content mixes centre management messaging with daily “feel good” news and live-action brand advertising from major clients like Debenhams, Disney Home Video, Sky and Vodafone, all of whom wish to fill the media gap at the point of purchase, where consumers are effectively influenced.
The Mall hopes to garner the same interest from advertisers with its Mall TV, which it launched across its network of 22 shopping centres in the UK. Delivered in partnership with Avanti, Mall TV will broadcast community news, local information and promotions from both national and local brands, with content varying according to local interest, day of the week and time of day.
“We think Mall TV will deliver major benefits to our retail customers in terms of consumer loyalty and awareness of promotions. It will offer advertisers unparalleled opportunity to influence consumers,” said Jacqueline White, The Mall’s commercial development manager. “Unlike major regional centres, the community nature of our malls means people are visiting two or three times a week, giving advertisers a chance to participate in the excellent relationship we have built with our shoppers.”
The advantage of technology is that it helps shopping centres strengthen those ties, communicating in meaningful ways with its clientele—shoppers, of course, but also with tenants, strategic partners, potential workers and the media.
It is this kind of “rich” communication that CH Consulting had in mind when it developed its ProCard, a business card sized CD-ROM that delivers a business message via an interactive presentation. From leasing packages to loyalty programme details to enhanced and highly visual news releases, the applications are wide ranging, especially when you consider the marketing feedback that comes with it.
Once the ProCard is loaded on the computer, data is captured and relayed at the same time the user views its content. The information is then transmitted back to a central, password-protected online database named iQcentral.
“A marketing tool like ProCard is the next best thing to being there in person,” said Christa Heibel, president and CEO of CH Consulting. “[It] gives you important feedback in real-time about your viewers’ interaction and reaction to your marketing message.”
The more intimately shopping centre marketers know their customers, the more they can successfully meet and exceed their expectations. Technology provides means to accomplish both. 
Look for more technology Ideas to Go in the next edition of  Tactics UK and Europe magazine.

TOP 10 HABITS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE CONSUMERS

(ranked by percentage of online consumers who perform this activity regularly)

1. Send email
2. Research holiday destinations
3. Prepare trips online
4. Use reference sites
5. Email/upload/store digital photos
6. Use free Web-based email
7. Visit government agency sites
8. Buy/sell things in auctions
9. Look up sports information
10. Look up movie information

Notes:
1. An online consumer is defined as a consumer age 16 or older who uses the Internet at least once a month.
2. While only ranked 15th, downloading music is very popular among young consumers. Participation rate is as high as 40 percent for those ages 16-24, but drops to four percent for consumers ages 65 and older.

Source: Forrester Consumer Technologies Q4 2004 European Study, which was based on a survey of 18,423 consumers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.

TOP 10 MARKETING TECHNOLOGIES

(Ranked by percentage of respondents who

indicated they were planning to implement the technologies in their businesses in 2005)

1. E-mail Delivery
2.  Data Mining
3. Customer Data Warehousing
4. Customer Relationship Management
5. Web Analytics
6. Business Intelligence
7. Digital Asset Management
8. Marketing Automation
9. Marketing Resource Management
10. Offer/Campaign Optimisation

Source: 2004 Forrester Research, Inc./Association of National Advertisers Survey on Marketing Accountability Technologies.

WEB DESIGN TIPS

Here are a few points to keep in ming when you are designing or revamping a Website:

1. Type size influences viewing behaviour. Large fonts encourage scanning, while smaller type forces viewers to actively read the words.
2. Catchy headlines and graphics bring browsers to scan the bottom of Web pages, which typically receive lower viewing.
3. Keep paragraphs short to keep your site’s homepage as dynamic as possible.
4. Mix ad formats to give each advertiser a chance to get noticed.
5.  Use pop-ups sparingly and strategically. These pop-ups must be quick-hitting, as they are likely to be minimised or closed altogether within a few seconds.