Rethinking Parking

Parking Lots - An edited DDI Column from 15 years ago. But even more relevant today. As we rethink order on-line pick up at the store - please let's review the basics...

Is there anything more American than the parking lot? We invented it. We coined all its ramifications from Parking as in lover’s lane, to trying to find a place to leave our car.  Parking lots facilitate our relationships with our cars. Yet they are inept places. Our driving skills are most challenged negotiating our way through them. Most of the scratches and wear and tear on our cars happens in parking lots. Body shops make more out of fender benders in parking lots than crashes on the highway.

There are parking lot specialists know the cost of construction, the building code on how much lighting, or foot-candles need to be installed per space. They have a formula from calculating how much parking a shopping mall needs, and what the cost of operating a valet parking facility is. For all that technical knowledge what puzzles me is how few merchants understand how much of the customer experience starts in the parking lot. I like taking retail executives out into their lots and just watching the action for a while. Every parking lot has terrible weather 24-7. It is too hot, cold, windy. At crowded mall parking lot the process of finding a spot and landmarking so you can find it again and making your way is often the worst part of the shopping experience.

Research has showed that people landmark based on age and gender. Men like numbers and letters. Women like colors, and kids like physical objects like fruit or animals. For every time I’ve gone to a mall I’m familiar with and parked and land-marked with uncommon skills, there are the times, where I’ve gotten lost.  My worst experience was after an hour of looking for my rental car at a mall outside Houston, when I’d begun to doubt my sanity, knowing that I’d missed my flight.

The paint treatments we use in parking lots have no regard to the real dimension of our cars – but to some engineers or building code prescription. The best paint treatment of a parking lot I’ve seen is a new Wal-Mart store in Falmouth, Massachusetts. There the paint treatment is designed to remind drivers, that the pedestrian right of way isn’t just in some narrow band that has no relationship to how people get from their cars to the door, but encompasses every piece of pavement within two hundred yards of the each entrance. Paint is so cheap – many stores could do seasonal treatments, just like lighting changes on the top of skyscrappers.

Almost no one takes aggressive control of their own parking lots. The Security Force at the mall is thought of as necessity not as a marketing tool. They don’t direct traffic unless they need to. They don’t own the parking lot - they patrol it.

One retail channel I have gotten to know are, Farm and Fleet Stores. These are large one hundred thousand square feet and bigger stores designed to serve farmers and rural businesses. They stock an enormous cross section of goods from Jeans and high-end cowboy boots to barbwire and tack for your pet donkey. Out on edges of no-where these large store sit in the middle of even larger parking lots. Land is cheap. The problem is the lots often look painfully empty. The regional chain we worked with had a policy of putting employee parking discretely at the back or side of the building. Our advise was to move the employee parking to the front of the store two thirds of the way from front door to the outer edge of the parking lot – a line of thirty or forty cars is powerful statement to passing customers that this store is open for business. 

If you are looking for guerilla marketing opportunities, there is one right outside your door. Working in Brazil over the past decade, we made sure building new malls that sections of the parking lots were wired for power and had water service. Food trucks, farmers markets, car shows and more - with a little thought (and not a lot of $$) parking goes from a cost, to an opportunity. In 2020 when shopping is in transformation - what are you doing with your parking? Come ask us - www.envirosell.com