Brick-and-mortar retailers taking cue from online players to map customers

With data at their disposal, malls are using key parameters like sales per square feet to determine health of brands

E-commerce is well-known for leveraging the digital footprint of visitors to target them with customised product offerings. Taking a cue from the likes of Amazon and Flipkart, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are sharpening their focus on data and technology to better map and target customers. Like online sellers, malls such as DLF Promenade, Select Citywalk and Oberoi Mumbai are mining customer data to drive footfalls and brand sales on their premises.

According to Yogeshwar Sharma, chief executive officer and executive director, Select Citywalk, “In comparison to e-commerce, customer knowledge and logistics are the two elements or capabilities that have been missing in the physical retail space. Now this is changing with brick-and-mortar players focusing on building comprehensive customer profiles and extensively mapping buying preferences.”

For example, Select Citywalk in New Delhi maps every corner of the mall, tracking individual customer movement with the help of iBeacons and sensors to ensure there are no so-called dead or inactive spaces. The management works closely with brands housed in the mall to help identify sales bottlenecks, if any.

Its Tommy Hilfiger store, at one point, was struggling to generate sales from a part of its outlet. A close analysis of visitor footfall, buying history and scrutiny of video footage revealed that out of the four-store walls one displaying professional products was underselling. The conclusion was that a majority of visitors came to shop for casual products and not for formal wear. Accordingly, the wall was rearranged and transformed into a productive zone.

Select Citywalk has gone as far as mapping its nearby catchment areas and has begun offering buyers (high spenders) coming from the affluent Sainik Farm special offers from a select 15 brands in the mall. It is also actively tracking the number and types of vehicles coming in. Shoppers coming from Sainik Farm are greeted with their names flashing on the boom barrier as they get into the parking lot. The move is aimed at offering a personalised buying experience to visitors from the word go. 

Most of the malls are using data available to them to assess the total number of visitors, identifying male, female and children as shoppers, and dwell time in shops on the premises. Further, individual store sales are tracked for billing to identify productive and not-so-productive areas in the mall.

DLF is sitting on huge pile of data. Two of its properties, Promenade at Vasant Kunj and Mall of India (Noida), get 1 million and 1.6 million visitors per month.

Pushpa Bector, executive vice-president and head, premium malls, DLF, says, “We are processing beacons and micro processors to figure out dwell time in stores and identifying the cold and hot zones within the property. For us, data mining is a question of creating awareness and interest among visitors through targeted promotions and marketing interventions.”

Data analytics has helped Bector’s team to fix quite a few problems. For instance, at DLF Mall of India, the lower ground was not getting much traffic. Taking cues from visitor movements, the team directed the footover bridge traffic to the ground level. Alongside, the company undertook customer-centric promotions like “Deal waali Diwali”. It led to doubled footfall at the lower ground.

Anupam T, vice-president, Oberoi Mall (Mumbai), has an interesting take. “We are customer-agnostic. We don’t know who is visiting us. But we do know their behaviour, activity pattern or number of times a customer is coming, stores or areas visitors are frequenting.”

With data at their disposal, malls are using key parameters like sales per square feet to determine the health of brands. Using sales pointers in tandem with other data, they are devising short and long-terms solutions to ensure there are no dead spots. Like its industry counterparts, Oberoi Mall too looks actively at the average sales per square feet by brands to determine retailers that need to be replaced or supported through marketing interventions like promotions. Based on individual selling history, footfalls at a store, etc. the team at Oberoi Mall also fine tunes its pricing (rental) strategy.

For a majority of malls, beauty and personal care, food and beverage and fashion are the highest selling categories. Taking note of the growing number of visitors and sales at food courts, Select Citywalk, for example, has steadily increased the number of curated food brands on its premises. Currently, tenant mix at the mall reflects the growth story in F&B segment. The mall houses 18 players in My Square — the food court. Additionally, the shopping centre has over 30 restaurants and cafés including Pa Pa Ya, Burma Burma, Andrea’s Eatery, Sushiya, Belgiun Waffle, Theobroma and Krispy Kreme among others.

Anupam points out that the key challenge before brick-and-mortar retailers and brands is how to continue to excite customers. Most of the times, brands lack consumer insights that could help them address buyer requirements. A closer and more in-depth profiling of visitors heading to malls could perhaps help marketers address this challenge.