Between East and West, or Seek Your Uniqueness
A promenade, a club, a giant fitting room, a place to learn how to fly an aeroplane and thousands of other options for interesting pastimes — all of this is what makes up a modern shopping centre. The importance of how not to get lost in modern trends and choose your own unique path was discussed at the Moscow Global Retail Real Estate Conference.
Purchasing = Entertainment
“It is entertainment that works best now”, said Ogannes Ayvazyan, managing director of the RIO Shopping Centre on Dmitrovskoye Highway, Moscow.
“Today, the shopping centre is far from the facility originally envisioned by sponsors when they invested in it”, commercial director of SVR Lyudmila Reva adds in support of her colleague.
Buyers are no longer surprised that a modern shopping centre can contain not just a cinema, but also, for example, an aquarium, a climbing wall or a Norwegian rope park.
Entertainment can be built directly into the purchasing process — for example, a kiosk where ice cream is sold by a robot instead of a person. The robot asks the buyer questions, responds to answers, offers an interesting product — and all this in itself is a driver that elicits emotions.
But it can also become an incentive to self-education. For example, a flight simulator where you can take a pilot training course is planned to open in one of Moscow’s shopping centres. It is a cockpit of a real aeroplane where you’ll be accompanied by an instructor — a retired pilot. Customers can choose any country, any airport and, under the instructor’s guidance, land their “plane” there.
Such entertainment becomes a uniqueness factor for the facility, and uniqueness is the cornerstone that provides the mall with continuous customer traffic.
“Uniqueness does not mean specialised shopping malls - outlets, shoe stores etc.”, confirms Lyudmila Reva. “Uniqueness is not a speciality. It is what distinguishes a specific shopping project working in its city with its own demographic from all other similar projects”.
The Food Hall is All
The food hall, which is one of the powerful anchors of the shopping centre, has become an obvious and vivid uniqueness factor.
“In Moscow, St. Petersburg and million-plus cities, about 30% of representatives of the public food service market are already located in shopping malls”, Lyudmila Reva emphasises.
“A food hall is all!”, insists Guillaume Sadoux, head of the ICSC Innovation Committee. “Today, if food service providers are high-quality, people spend more, thus increasing the time spent in shopping areas”.
The evolution of food services in the shopping centre is obvious: we have come from a very efficient and functionally well-arranged but rather boring food court — a public food service plant, as Sadoux calls it - to an interesting gastronomic space with the right lighting, green areas and specialised furniture.
“A modern food hall is an environment where we sell a lifestyle!”, states Guillaume Sadoux.
The food hall is not just for eating: festivals and other events are held there.
New buyer strategy
“Today, many more changes take place in retail within 5 years than used to happen over 20,” says Sofya Shchukina, business partner for regional marketing of Ceetrus Russia. “The market is changing dramatically, and we are already thinking about what people will do in 5 years, what will be important to them. And every developer is actually trying to move away from the generation theory toward some comprehensible behavioural models in order to find the offer that will be interesting to its particular customers, including very young ones, who cannot be ranked as buyers yet”.
Today, such trends as the decline in consumer income, responsible consumption, moderate consumption and the decreasing frequency of visits to shopping centres are developing more and more, and it is vital for developers to understand what turns a visit into a conversion and experience into money.
The only possible way is synthesis and synergy
“When we talk about trends, let's not forget that a trend is not a call to action”, Sofya stresses. “It is a glimpse of reality, which can turn into a strategy but can also die out. The experience we get from different markets varies and only one thing can be stated with confidence: when you try to simply copy something, it does not work, so the only possible way is synthesis and synergy”.
Why will people need shopping centres in 2025? Those who can give the right answer to this today will be successful in the future.
“There are two ways in the world”, says Sofya, “the eastern and western ones. The western one implies a kind of struggle, the eastern implies inclusion from the very start, so the goal of a territory located between East and West is to find its own unique path, absorbing all that’s best from both worlds”.