How mobile can help ignite the Portas Pilots
Phil Gault, director of strategy at Sponge Group, believes that those in charge of town centre management can learn a lot from the way individual retailers are using mobile to attract people to stores. Here he discusses how town centres can get mobile.
So the Portas Pilots have begun and will be proving themselves out over the coming months. The ATCM’s (Association of Town Centre Management) 100 Ways initiative recently offered more pointers to help rejuvenate Britain’s town centres, but how can they use the one thing that everyone carries to encourage people back to shopping on the High Street?
It would be easy to dismiss the Portas Pilots as a slightly cynical, rather Sir Humphrey-ish exercise in governmental window-dressing (pun fully intended).
I prefer to take the view of Guy Grainger, head of retail at Jones Lang LaSalle, who thinks the scheme is positive at least in so far as “it recognises the need to invest in creative solutions for our town centres which are under threat from structural changes in retail”.
In the initial stages of the programme, 15 areas from Berwick to Tiverton will receive aid of £100,000 each; with the money being earmarked for everything from improved parking facilities to mentoring support for independent retailers.
It seems no fewer than 400 different towns applied to be part of the scheme. Which got me thinking. If we took, say, two of the available aid packages…what strategies and solutions could we create that would be of real value and utility to all 400 town centres and the communities they serve?
While Sponge would never claim that it’s some kind of magic bullet, I think mobile would be high on the list of candidates. There’s a lot of activity going on at the moment examining how mobile can drive trial, spend and repeat for individual retail brands; and much of that learning is directly transferable to retail geographies.
Let’s start with some Big Picture stuff. First, the supply side of the equation: more than 11% of town centre shops are currently deserted. With frightening precision, Shadow Minister for Communities and Local Government Roberta Blackman-Woods tells us that equates to “a record 23,406 empty shops”. Among the survivors, the rising cost of doing business has significantly impacted on individual retailers’ ability to invest in improving their offering.
Meanwhile, on the demand side, there’s been a pronounced shift in consumer spending patterns. In 2000, £50 out of every £100 we spent went to High Street retailers. Today, it’s just £42.50. A good chunk of that money has migrated to out-of-town retailers; the rest to eCommerce.
So there’s an archetypal vicious circle at work here: fewer shops running at higher cost attracting less shoppers spending less money reducing retailers’ capacity to invest…or indeed survive.
While it may have an indirect impact on the supply side of things, the role for any marketing channel is typically to stimulate demand. And when it comes to town centres, I believe mobile is particularly well-placed to create and maintain demand.
The most effective mobile marketing uses the contexts of time and place to deliver value to individuals in highly relevant and personalised ways; and then encourages people to share the experience socially. A couple of excellent examples, both from the US, would be Shopkick (http://www.shopkick.com) and Starbucks (http://www.starbucks.com/coffeehouse/mobile-apps).
So how do we apply these principles to the challenges facing the High Street? The first requirement is to incentivise footfall, to provide local people who rarely or never visit their town centre with a compelling reason to ‘take another look’. One way of achieving this would be to launch a digital membership scheme which entitles users to offers or value-adds from participating retailers; a sort of geographically-focused equivalent to dining clubs like Tastecard or Hi-Life.
Mobile would be the ideal way to get membership cards into shoppers’ hands, and to keep them there. Just send in a text and download the card to the home screen of your phone. Then show it in-store and benefit from whatever that retailer has chosen to offer: two main meals for the price of one; 15% off; spend £30 and get something free.
Even if somewhat hollowed-out, town centres have the advantage of offering a wide variety of goods and services. By harnessing that collective strength, a proposition like the above would deliver value to a high proportion of the defined catchment area. By making it as easy as possible for shoppers and retailers alike to benefit from the scheme, mobile could help drive a significant uplift in footfall and spend.
Having created a shift in behaviour, the challenge is to make it habitual. Ultimately, it is frequency that will determine the High Street’s economic health. Mobile has a key role to play here too. First, High Streets should launch simple, mobile-optimised sites that allow shoppers to access the latest news and offers 24/7. Second, data collection (starting with the mobile number acquired when people text in for their membership card) will allow individual retailers to promote ‘specials’ to relevant segments, thus driving business during low periods.
Strategies like the above have real potential to create and sustain demand. And there are clear builds on the model: the mobile site could be extended to include community features like jobs or bulletin boards; retailers could co-operate to create bundled deals (“show your cinema ticket to get a free bottle of wine at Carlo’s Trattoria”); and so on.
What is even more exciting, I think, is that solutions like these are repeatable and scalable – in a way that new parking facilities, for instance, are not. Which takes us back to the challenge we originally set ourselves: to create something that could be deployed across all 400 town centres that applied to become a Portas Pilot.
For a relatively modest sum of money, the Government could fund the creation of a set of mobile tools that every High Street in the country could leverage: a two-way messaging platform; a common Content Management System; a shared CRM backbone; a set of design templates that could be quickly re-skinned. For the cost of something like two of the current aid packages, it could provide a turnkey solution that would allow every town centre to drive business and add value to the local shopping community.
That’s the sort of initiative I’d be happy to see my taxes support.
Don’t miss the Retail Bulletin’s Mobile Retailing Summit 26th September 2012. For the full programme and registrtion click here.
