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Shopping Centers Today -> May 2004
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PROMOTION CAN BE TRICKY IN EUROPE’S DIVERSE MARKETS
The shopping center environment in Europe presents some challenges to corporate sponsorships that are not present in the United States. For one thing, shopping center development has proceeded more slowly in Europe, and the industry is less mature, points out Julia A. Langkraehr, managing director of Retail Profile, a London-based specialty leasing consulting firm. Such refinements as sponsorship have consequently been later to arrive on the Continent.
Langkraehr also observes that with its numerous national and linguistic differences, Europe can’t be approached as a single consumer market. “It’s so diversified and so fragmented,” she said. “A shopping center in Italy is totally different from one in the Czech Republic, for example. You don’t get economies of scale like in the U.S.”
A shortage of large, attractive, high-profile mall venues, too, has hindered the creation of sponsorship programs, says Scott Abbey, senior manager of group retail management at Rodamco Europe, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. “There are very few Bluewaters and Centros in Europe,” he said. “So if a company wants to tie its name to a property, there really aren’t a huge number of exceptional centers.”
There is a different marketing orientation in Europe, too, says Bill Doyle, vice president of Performance Research, a Newport, R.I.-based sponsorship marketing consulting firm. “In Europe and the U.K., name recognition is still a major focus, and most sponsors are driven by the need for exposure to get their names on television or a billboard,” Doyle said. Sports events such as World Cup soccer matches or Formula One auto races are most popular with branded sponsors, he says. “But in the U.S., they want meaningful interaction with consumers to change their image or build customer loyalty,” Doyle said, noting that shopping centers are well suited to the interactive approach. A carmaker might, for example, drive customers to the parking lot in one of its own late-model SUVs, or put on a fashion show in the center court with the outfits color-coordinated to match the cars on display.
Europe presents certain marketing opportunities that North America does not, says Petra Maruca, vice president of partner marketing at The Mills Corp. She says cell phone numbers are used as market-profiling data there, for example; text-messaging on cell phones is more widely used by consumers, she points out, “so customers can be accessed through these messages at the point of sale, welcomed to the shopping center and invited to take advantage of certain discounts offered by retailers.”
— ST
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