Thoughts on Future of Retail: how malls can make money in the era of Digital Disruption

Do you wonder how malls make money? And how big the gap is between the pricing model for an online marketplace and the pricing model while being a tenant in a mall?

If you ever paid rent + marketing charges + maintenance service charges to have a store within a mall how big was your frustration when you realized there is no direct correlation between your sales performance and the quality of the indoor traffic to the pricing model the mall operator was charging you?

Malls can become the media giants in the nearby future. Data is the new oil for all malls around the world. Getting in the business of the data economy (data acquisition, data processing, data monetization) means a new, more scalable and very profitable revenue stream.

THE CONTEXT

The digital convenience & the performance-based pricing models of online marketplaces creates frustration for tenants and retail brands operating inside malls.

Malls operators & REITs have to change how they value their retail properties and how to rethink their pricing model for the new paradigm where all retail brands expect their costs to be directly correlated to their sales.

This is a evolutionary process that will take long and it is mainly stuck in the investment models and the investors' mindset.

Right now there is a yet untapped income stream lingering in plain sight just beyond reach. All those visitors generating all that data just walking around in the real world of a mall, data that is waiting to be collected, turned into insight and become added value to each visit, to each shopper.

More specifically for a mall operator or owner this means a new sort of asset: transforming data into advertising and this, in turn, into a high-margin source of profits.

People still spend more than?87%?of their time in indoor environments.

THE CHANGE

The indoor retail space is still attracting?1.7 billion?shoppers each year and people still spend more than?87%?of their time in indoor environments. With the rise of online shopping, the future takes the shopping mall back to its most basic, primary role: a gathering ground, the place where people meet, hang out, eat, walk, shop, fall in love and go about their leisure time.

These interactions generate an invaluable amount of usable data. An understanding of the shopper behavior can translate into programmatic offline & online retail media, tenant rent predictions, brand cross promos, a decrease in marketing costs and so much more.

With the understanding of the most common indoor paths, shop relations, linger time, visit and purchase behaviors, another layer of information and insight can be added to the decision-making process when it comes to indoor advertising and the marketing process in general.

5-8 times?increase in advertising targeting precision for retail brands.

?AI-driven ad tech can predict in-store shopping behaviors allowing retail property owners to collect, own, analyze and monetize indoor location intelligence through programmatic advertising & marketing automation. All this translates into 5-8x increase in advertising targeting precision?for retail brands. With a close-to-purchase and direct attribution of their advertising spent and how it reflects into retail sales.

THE OPPORTUNITY

The mining and refining of real-world interaction data bring a new possibility in the advertising world. Shopping malls can create valuable streams of advertising revenues by monetizing their own indoor location data. This model is made as such that each data collector can share the anonymous audience bundles with other advertising entities in order to monetize further on the offline information contained within mall environments.

Let’s take a more tangible vantage point. Let’s say Sarah is a constant visitor with a high predilection towards shoes. The system will pick up on her mobile’s anonymous signature and showcase new shoes offers on the indoor display. If Sarah has opted in to share her data with the mall (via its mobile app or website) she can receive targeted advertisements on her phone at a time she is most likely to provide positive feedback to the message prescribed (at home, at the office, at the mall).

By making good use of indoor location intelligence crossed with online data, the tool at hand can pinpoint the moment when the right shopper is most likely to react to the right message and deliver the creative content on the format that is most likely to engage with the shopper.

Intuition has been replaced by the science of tracking incremental choices, figuring out the precise decision moment and swaying that decision in a positive way for the shopper, the brand, the mall … and the stakeholders.

Footprints?has unique capabilities to empower malls to transform offline and online shopping behaviors into an omnichannel self-service Retail Media Network in 3 months or less. Data is the new oil for malls and Footprints is the AI technology to harness and monetize it.

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