Insight: Customer connections critical for Brandspace

For any business in the world right now, connecting with customers is critically important.

After a challenging couple of years, where people have felt more isolated than ever, we’re all looking for connection, community and engagement – a return to life as we knew it, but more local. It’s been a common thread in research conducted by Vicinity’s Insights team which says 45% of Australians say they choose retailers in part because of their geographic locations while Google searches for ‘available near me’ have grown by more than 100% in the past year.

A ‘sense of belonging’ is important too. For example, research at Chadstone tells us that ‘a sense of belonging’ is the number one driver of advocacy amongst customers.

At Vicinity, we’ve long been committed to providing leading customer experiences. It’s the reason people choose to visit our centres; to shop the world’s leading brands, enjoy mouth-watering dining, and have hours of entertainment fun. We also strive to deliver unique experiences through marketing, be it at Christmas or throughout the year with campaigns like the recent Monopoly Shop, Scan, Win, and in work life as we grow our mixed-use portfolio.

Through our centres, we connect with local communities and we’re committed to ensuring those connection create unique experiences for millions of customer visits we see across our centres.

While our customers are visiting our centres, it’s critical to ensure we create experiential moments inside our centres with retail, dining and entertainment offerings complemented by constant innovation and creativity of our media and Brandspace opportunities.

We’ve enjoyed success over a number of years building Australia’s largest retail digital supersite screen network, connecting brands & retailers with an engaged audience looking for inspiration and new experiences.

Media and Brandspace is an opportunity to talk to customers directly and we’re constantly innovating to deliver content that our customers love. Our digital supersite network comprises of 133 large format screens across 34 shopping destinations, with new technology allowing them to be shaped in curves, cylinders or waves for maximum impact. Complementing it is the introduction of brand-new strategically placed digital lightboxes and cutting-edge lucid LED doors.

The LED doors represent genuine innovation in the media space, consisting of a transparent digital mesh that is affixed to the inside of the panels. We worked with our technology partner BMG to create lucid LED screens that replaced static decals to create flexible, animated displays across key shopper entrances. The digital nature of the doors also allows for agile creative uploads - a point of difference for the client and a reduction of traditional production costs.

While our products have proved strong enough to stand on their own two feet, we’re seeing the greatest connections with customer when we elevate brands through integrated media and Brandspace, combining digital supersite screens with light boxes, doors and our highly customisable Brandspace. This holistic approach presents a number of touch points to the customer and allows brands to be highly creative.

A great case study into using assets in an innovative way was the recent L’Oréal YSL Beauty Zones campaign at Chadstone that won the ‘Best use of Multi-Format’ category in the Outdoor Media Associations (OMA) Q2 Creative Collection awards.

The OMA's Creative Collection is designed to acknowledge and celebrate the best Out-of-Home creative and innovative media executions each quarter.

L’Oreal’s YSL campaign featured an activation with four distinct zones allowing customers to experience different products from the YSL beauty range. The campaign was supported by centre media assets including the Digital Supersite Network, Digital Lightbox with 3D creative, Digital Doors, Static Doors and a Luxury Bridge Decal.

We’ve also seen success from other brands including FitBit who combined in-centre media assets – Digital Supersite Network – with online assets including centre WiFi, centre website branding and centre eDMs, again drawing success from different touch points.

Fitbit's multi-channel execution allowed customers to explore the brand digitally before being exposed to retail media in-centre, boasting over 115,000 unique views on website placements, 15% eDM open rate, and over 500,000 incremental reach to their retail media campaign.

The success of integrating new media and Brandspace technologies while using captivating creative content is a growing trend which we expect to be around for a long time. Our job is to make sure our assets perform and give brands the reach and space to be creative and connect with our customers.

Using research, trend report, learnings from overseas and engagement with brands and customers, we know the retail industry will continue to evolve.

We’re exploring a wide range of innovative new technologies to allow for even closer, more bespoke customer experiences.

Watch this space.

This article featured in Shopping Centre News Vol. 40 No. 5 - Little Guns 2022.