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Center helps diverse customers 'Share the Mall'

By Kevin Kenyon

When Sheila Hunter, marketing director for Fiesta Mall, a 1.1 million-square-foot center in Mesa, Ariz., invited two distinct focus groups to the mall early last year, she fully expected to hear wildly different responses to the same question. Instead, she heard much of the same.

Fiesta Mall's 'Share the Mall' program, which aims to promote tolerance, grew out of focus groups.

Responding to questions regarding how they think they are perceived, the first group, which consisted entirely of teen-agers in baggy pants with pierced body parts and rainbow-colored hair, said they longed to be understood by those who prejudged them.

"They wished that people in general would just give them a chance," Hunter remembered. "The collective feeling was 'we know we look different, we may have orange and green hair, but they don't know who we are.'"

The second group, baby boomer parents and seniors, or the 'they' the teen-agers were referring to, also felt misunderstood.

"They basically said the same thing. The comment was 'we just wish that younger people would accept us for who we are and not think we're just old, or that we're geeks, or that we walk down the mall too slowly.' "

Out of those meetings rose a community awareness campaign called Share the Mall, which Hunter dreamed up in response to what she heard that day.

"Each age group wished that another age group would just accept them for who they are, tolerate them and respect them. And that really is what this was born out of."

The campaign, which was launched in April 1998, was designed to address the issue of diversity by promoting tolerance, Hunter said.

Its main component is interactive cube displays located throughout the mall that allow users to mix and match the different faces and clothing of four very distinct kinds of shoppers. The theme of the displays is "We all look different, and that's OK."

For the balance of the year, the interactive displays featured a question of the month, such as: What does "Share the Mall" mean to you? When you look at these four people on the cubes, what is your perception? Do you judge people by the way they look, and do you want to be judged by the way you look?

After collecting and tabulating responses to these questions earlier this year, Hunter was surprised once again.

"I was amazed mainly at the number of responses and the difference in ages -- we had 12-year-olds, teen-agers, baby boomers and retirees all responding to the same questions, so it was of obvious interest to a lot of different age groups."

Since that time, Hunter said Share the Mall has gained a life of its own, gaining positive publicity for the center, which is owned by The L&B Group, Dallas.

As part of the program, mall employees also took part in cultural diversity and sensitivity seminars, to make sure shoppers of varied backgrounds were treated with equal amounts of respect. She noted that the campaign has also been tied in with the mall's charitable work, including its Random Acts of Kindness program.

More recently, an effort has been made to turn Share the Mall from a public relations campaign to a retail ad campaign, to see how it fits in with the retail scheme.

"One reason the shopping center was created in the first place was to have a retail diversity that satisfies a broad range of customers.

Share The Mall features displays that allow users to mix and match the faces and clothing of shoppers.

That's basically what a shopping center does, and that's really what we're trying to emphasize now," Hunter explained.

With that in mind, mall officials launched a series of television and print advertisements earlier this year.

The ads, which extend the message of diversity in sports, focus on the high profile rivalry between the University of Arizona (UA) and Arizona State University (ASU), according to Hunter.

"Here in Arizona, you're either an ASU fan or you're a UA fan -- and you're not anywhere in-between -- so we thought that would be a fun way to introduce this."

The television ads feature a jersey from each university. The ASU and UA jerseys are competing for attention on the screen until a referee breaks them up, Hunter said. The ad closes with the phrase, "We all take different sides. That's OK."

Similar ads include Coke vs. Pepsi, with a tag-line of "Everybody has different tastes," and one for Fathers' Day that explores the age-old question of boxers vs. briefs, she added.

Later this year, Hunter said mall officials will conduct an awareness campaign to evaluate the effectiveness of the Share the Mall program.

"We want to find out who has heard of it, if they like it, and what it means to them, and then we'll take it from there."

Such efforts are helping the mall compete in a fiercely competitive trade area, which saw the arrival of Arizona Mills in 1997 in west Tempe and the expansion of Scottsdale Fashion Square last year.

That's in addition to Tri-City Mall and Superstition Springs Center in Mesa, and Los Arcos Mall in Scottsdale, not to mention the proposed SanTan Fashion Center in Chandler.

Fiesta Mall, for its part, is in the midst of its first major renovation since opening in October 1979.

Plans call for an extensive overhaul that will include changes in flooring, lighting, and landscaping, as well as a shift to a desert oasis theme.

According to mall officials, talks are also under way to add a fifth anchor to the current roster, which includes Sears, Robinsons-May, Macy's, Dillard's and 152 specialty stores.

Fiesta Mall's new look will feature graphics and design that depict dawn in the Sears court, midday at center court, and dusk at Dillard's court, with the
environment changing gradually in between.