Experience the shopping centre of the future

Managing the shopping centre of the future will have more to do with content management using social media than with real estate. Shopping centres will be designed as strategies for engaging consumers to interact with brands in physical space. According to research commissioned by Westfield, an international shopping centres developer and operator (Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield since June 2018), five trends can be distinguished that have an impact on the shape and organisation of current and future shopping centres:

1. Rental and sharing

With such companies as Uber or Airbnb, the sharing economy has become a fixture among consumers. Music or movies are no longer being bought but accessed on platforms such as Spotify or Netflix. Around 46 pct consumers between the ages of 25 and 34 would consider renting their favourite products rather than buying them. It’s not difficult to imagine shopping centres of the future selling subscription access to the product range of its stores. According to Westfield’s study, 17 pct of British people would be prepared to pay a fixed monthly fee in exchange for unlimited access to clothes stores.

2. Classroom retail

Consumers are eager to see stores as places where they can acquire new skills or build relationships with people with similar interests. Customers will be happy to learn how to repair or maintain a product or how it can be used creatively. Therefore, training sessions in the areas of healthy lifestyles, cooking classes or make-up shows could become be popular. A new concept developed by Sephora, the Beauty Hub, basically involved the introduction of such classroom retail principles.

3. A new approach to loyalty programmes

The consumer of the future will prefer to be rewarded for making good life choices rather than for the purchase itself. The purchase of a given product will also be an act defining the values represented by the buyer. New loyalty programmes will reward customers, e.g. for recycling products, maintaining a healthy lifestyle or for being charitable (e.g. donating unused clothes or unused food to those in need).

4. Engaging all the senses

The brick-and-mortar store must be able to provide the customer with something that he or she cannot experience online. This should involve the use of all the senses – vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch – at one time, this being the biggest advantage of the physical store over online transactions. That’s why it will be very important to design unusual places that are memorable or ‘Instagrammable’ – as posting such images of yourself in an unusual place will encourage others to go there.

5. Virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) will become ubiquitous in the future. Consumers will use the opportunity they provide to see what a given product looks like in their apartment as a natural thing. Interactive changing rooms are already nothing out of the ordinary. Last year, L’Oreal bought ModiFace, which, by using augmented reality technology, has developed an app that allows you to see how hair dye would look on your phone screen using a real time image of yourself.

The traditional formula of the shopping centre, as a place in which products are introduced to the mass market, will be replaced the ‘pull-marketing’ approach, in which malls will be designed around the needs and interests of the consumer market, and will be more and more diversified in terms of age, values, locations and cultural circles.