Even in emerging markets such as Central and Eastern Europe, effective shopping centre marketing still comes down to sound research and market awareness

by Eileen Connolly

It doesn’t matter where your shopping centre is located within Europe—the marketing basics don’t change. An effective marketing campaign is based on good research and knowing your target market.
Creative marketing campaigns are exciting and fun, but if they don’t deliver increased sales for centre retailers there’s no point in running them. The most effective campaigns are those that are both creative and simple, and frankly there haven’t been many of those around recently anywhere across Europe.
For shopping centres in the newer markets of Central and Eastern Europe, one of the biggest headaches in marketing is introducing a new retail brand into a shopping centre and creating an awareness of it amongst shoppers.
Fashion stores such as Reserved and Cropp Town (part of the Polish Group LPP) are very well-known to Eastern European shoppers, with more than 200 units open in Poland, Russia, the Baltic states, Ukraine and the region. However, Western European and U.S. brands keen to move into Eastern Europe need marketing support from the shopping centre to establish their place. The most effective marketing for these new brands will be joint marketing with the shopping centre.
Good retailers will recognise that they need to become totally engaged with the shopping centre’s marketing team. The newer markets of Central and Eastern Europe should learn from the past mistakes of the older, Western European shopping centres where the marketing team and centre retailers didn’t take any interest in each-other’s marketing strategies.
Newer shopping centres accept that teamworking between retailers and centre management will produce much more effective results than working independently, and it will also maximise the marketing budget. Co-promotions, car-park and amenity sponsorships are all effective ways of targeting customers and combining marketing budgets to maximum effect. Budgeting with care is particularly crucial for new shopping-centre marketing teams.
Opening a new shopping centre is, obviously, very important and the marketing spend can be substantial if the launch is done properly. There is little doubt that high impact spending is essential, but the pitfall is to walk away from the euphoria of the opening launch with nothing left to spend.
I can’t emphasise enough the need to budget for immediate post-launch research at street level to find out if the launch has been really successful and to identify areas where marketing is still needed—with Zloty Tarasy opening later this year in Warsaw, it will be interesting to see how ING Real Estate is tackling the marketing issues.
Companies should not underestimate the power of PR, either. PR is very cost effective when it’s done properly. Column inches are what will really entice visitors to a centre. PR can cost considerably less than traditional advertising, especially in a media fragmented region.
Like big centre openings, special events, too, can deceive the marketeer into thinking that higher footfall means higher sales. Events don’t necessarily drive sales and, in fact, can often get in the way. We need to move away from a marketing department’s dependence on events as there is little evidence to say that they drive sales after the event.
Another element of shopping centre management that will be interesting to watch in emerging markets is online marketing. Whilst online marketing is increasingly important in Western Europe, the Central and Eastern Europe markets are still not as computer-aware because Internet access still lags behind.
It will be a few years yet before as many people in the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe have the domestic access to the Internet as others in Western Europe have become accustomed to. However, that time will come and shopping centres should be ready for it as it opens a vast range of alternative methods to obtain goods and services.
Central and Eastern European marketers should also be prepared to serve market-savvy and demanding consumers right in their own backyards. The power of the media is such that consumer expectations across the whole of Europe are rising all the time. Luckily, countries such as Romania and Latvia are able to skip 30 years of development lessons by using the successful design, development and marketing techniques perfected by those companies who have been in the shopping centre industry since the beginning.
Whether shopping centres in Central and Eastern Europe decide to adapt Western models to their markets or come up with their own winning formulas, my advice to all marketers, wherever they are, is to make sure they don’t get carried away with a creative ideas and forget their market. Just keep it simple. .
Eileen Connolly is business development director and head of retail marketing for Donaldsons UK. Connolly, who has pioneered research-based marketing in the European retail real estate industry, is this year’s chair of the ICSC European Conference.
She has also chaired the ICSC Solal European Marketing Awards and the ICSC Maxi awards, and is an Advisory Board member of BCSC and ICSC Europe.