Data-Driven Malls & the Technology Empowering Intelligent Retail

A New Year for Growth and Change

With a new year well underway,  now is the ideal time for shopping centers and malls to reflect and assess whether their current strategies and technology solutions are setting them up for success. In 2022, the industry worked to recover from the long-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the in-store experience. This year will be the one where malls show their resilience and reestablish their relevance by proactively tackling challenges to deliver a visionary customer experience – all while driving efficiency and growth behind the scenes. At the helm of this revolution is video analytics, a technology that has historically and successfully addressed the vast security and asset protection demands of malls everywhere but whose adoption is now more widely motivated by its ability to deliver business intelligence for cross-departmental impact. Today’s retail video analytics solutions effectively transform existing surveillance investments into data-driven profit centers by providing shopping centers with powerful business intelligence insights to increase marketing and merchandising effectiveness, justify tenant lease rates, while also streamlining security for advanced retail asset protection and public safety. The data-driven shopping mall and the technology empowering intelligent retail are primed and ready to transform the industry.

How Video Analytics Can Help

Using video analytics technology drives business intelligence, operational efficiency, and increased productivity for every department in a retail organization, as well as shopping center management. When video data is aggregated over time, it can uncover quantifiable patterns and trends, presented in visual reports, dashboards, and heatmaps. These data visualization tools have the obvious benefit of helping malls reduce and proactively prevent crime, but they also have the revolutionary ability to help other departments understand customer behavior and mall operations to drive intelligent decision-making.

Here are 6 areas where retail video analytics is impacting the success of malls with data-driven intelligence:

1. Visionary Customer Experience: With the continued expansion of online retail, physical malls are feeling increased pressure to deliver in-person shopping experiences that deliver the same customized experience available online. In order to enhance overall engagement and provide an optimized customer experience, retail video analytics helps malls analyze unique customer traffic with heat maps and dwell visualizations, so merchandising and marketing departments can gain deeper insight into the customer journey through the entire property. Mall management can use these analytics to determine whether customers are coming to shop or see a movie, how many people are leaving the mall with a shopping bag, and even how many people are coming to the mall solely for entertainment and dining offerings. Empowered with this data, marketing and merchandising departments can tailor their efforts to increase customer engagement for maximum effectiveness.
2. Targeted Marketing Campaigns: Whether trying to drive traffic to specific kiosks or advertisements, retail video analytics can empower malls to make strategic marketing decisions using their existing security video surveillance infrastructure. By measuring the time visitors spend in different areas or tracking unique, total, or bounced visits (factoring out employees and store associates), malls can inform their campaign and advertising strategies to effectively drive traffic throughout the shopping center. This information can also be leveraged as a value-added service for tenants who are interested in data-driven marketing intelligence to inform their own product and ad placements.
   
3. Space Justification and Intelligent Layouts: Most malls base their pricing on space size and perception of prime locations, but video analytics can provide data-driven insights on location specific traffic and detailed visitation demographics that benefit the leasing pipeline. For instance, video analytics can be leveraged to perform data-driven a/b testing of mall layouts by utilizing heatmaps to uncover visitation trends. Empowered with this knowledge, a mall can understand if their leasing rates are fair and equitable based on facts rather than mall layout alone. Once prime locations are verified, mall management can reasonably adjust or renegotiate lease rates. The same can be applied to advertising spaces like billboards.
4. Insight-Based Leasing: Similarly, leasing departments will be empowered to have proactive, fact-based discussions with potential tenants based on data provided by retail video analytics. Understanding customer volume, preferences, demographics, and trends, like which stores, kiosks, and areas of a mall customers typically visit, can support malls in helping retailers select the location that best supports their needs and target audience within the mall.
5. Special Events: Video analytics tools can also support tailored specialty leasing contracts for malls. When leasing departments understand common paths, popular dwell areas, and footfall trends, mall decision makers can determine where and when an event should take place, or where a seasonal shop should be located for maximum success. Furthermore, retail video analytics empowers malls to understand the efficacy of specialty events and leasing which empowers them to develop more effective strategies in the future.

6. Resource Allocation: Malls are always bustling, but due to their size, it is hard for mall management to appropriately allocate resources to ensure optimal maintenance. However, video analytics empowers management to intelligently deploy staff based on actual usage data, instead of basing facility maintenance on routine timetables, to improve efficiency and create a cleaner environment for guests with targeted maintenance efforts. It is also possible to trigger real-time, rule-based alerts to notify maintenance teams once a specific number of people have entered a restroom or food court, thus indicating a required maintenance check.

The New “Business as Usual”

As you can see, video analytics is no longer a security only solution for malls. Retail video analytics is a powerful, cross-departmental asset that drives meaningful impact to the entirety of the mall enterprise. I believe this year will be the one where malls show their resilience and reestablish their relevance, but continuing with business as usual won’t deliver the desired result. Intelligent retail and the data-driven mall is the new “business as usual” running on the power that only video analytics can provide.