ART’s Director, Gareth Jordan, penned an article in the latest issue of Retail Destination to look at how empowering your customers with advanced analytics creates a ripple effect, enhancing their performance, visitor value, and, ultimately, shared success.
Helping your customers serve their customers better through analytics is a powerful way to enhance value across the retail and hospitality chain. Landlords can create a mutually beneficial relationship where both parties thrive by fostering an environment that encourages growth, longevity and customer satisfaction.
The new value proposition
Consumer shifts keep retail and placemaking on its toes, but the industry is proving its adaptability and resilience in identifying new drivers of performance. Maintaining a competitive edge is no longer simply about drawing out KPIs to work from, but also offering value. We see this value shift reflected in data strategies, whether you are managing high street real estate or a shopping centre, which clearly involves distinct approaches and considerations. The overarching trend toward connecting the dots between data and value and sharing it will continue to gain momentum into 2025 and beyond.
Customer focus
At ART, we are pleased to be working with The Crown Estate to support their innovative approach in Central London. The landowner and custodian of buildings along Regent Street and across St James’s, we supported The Crown Estate’s Customer Manager Alasdair McClimont to help drive customer KPIs. Alasdair approaches supporting and driving the performance of the brands that feature in the spaces he works, always with a retailer’s perspective in mind – something that he draws from personal experience.
Creating both local appeal and global distinction requires innovative and practical solutions that meet the changing needs of visitors, retail and hospitality customers. The Crown Estate uses Retail Advantage to provide on-demand data, insights and communications.
Alasdair McClimont, Customer Manager at The Crown Estate, said: “At The Crown Estate we use ART’s Retail Advantage to support our ambition to be a collaborative partner to our customer brands through the sharing of data and insights to help drive their KPIs. The portal also enables us to measure and understand our customers’ performance and link this to our marketing activity to ensure we are targeting our activity in the right way and delivering with impact.”
Resilience and adaptability
From a real-time view of sales, category performance, like-for-like growth, social media engagement to customer satisfaction metrics, the insights and priorities for landlords and their customers evolve. Dynamic destinations not only require actionable data insights to develop with changing customer needs and conditions, but also flexibility in measuring and reporting tools to align with this strategy. Our experience also shows that the more value and understanding you draw from the data you have also informs the data you need – holistically addressing opportunities. Shifts might often be subtle, but tools and innovation partners must afford you this freedom and create the necessary space for business to adapt. Moving away from static charts and graphs gives property teams the power to slice and dice data to provide agile views on information that helps build inclusive growth and lasting value.
There are numerous ways to approach an understanding of customer behaviour. The clever avenue that is often missed is to pool strategic resources and enjoy a connected approach from landlord through to brand. For instance, the view of the average customer could be seen as quite different if you are taking only one set of data in isolation instead of a balanced view. By fostering a collaborative workflow, enhancing brand insights reveals a richer understanding and proactive places focused on shared success.