Hammerson’s first car port photovoltaic (PV) system commenced generating at the end of August 2018 as part of a PV roll out at Victoria Gate Leeds. Installing PV on the mall roof and the car park was the culmination of a successful sustainability strategy for the BREEAM Excellent development.
Small Business Saturday will take place for the sixth time in the UK this weekend. It’s all about celebrating smaller, independent brands, and encouraging consumers all over the country to buy local.
Dropbox Business Blog spoke to Head of Customer Experience Kathryn Malloch about why Hammerson’s footfall figures are outperforming the national average. With over 22 shopping centres, 13 retail parks, 20 premium outlets and a combined lettable space of 2.3 million square metres across 14 countries, Hammerson is uniquely placed to talk about shopping, innovation and the evolution of retail towards experiential design.
CREATE EXPERIENCES TO DRIVE FOOTFALL IN-STORE
It’s that time of year again when Christmas lists are being written across the UK. The chat around this year’s Christmas TV ‘blockbuster’ commercials is creating a stir on social media channels.
At this time of year there’s always a lot written about Blue Monday, allegedly the ‘most depressing day of the year’. Blue Monday is the brainchild of American psychologist Dr. Cliff Arnall who in 2005 created a complex formula covering everything from the weather to motivation levels to calculate when people would most feel down. This year, Blue Monday falls today.
While we all suffer from the post-Christmas blues, in truth, there’s little to suggest that today will be any more depressing than any other day of the year.
This January, a new burger restaurant opened its first UK operation at The Oracle in Reading. At first glance Miami Burger looks like most other fast-food restaurants, offering breakfast, burgers, hot dogs and shakes. Looks can be deceiving; you won’t find a beef patty, chicken wing or deep fat fryer here. Miami Burger’s USP is to offer “great tasting fast food without the bad stuff”. The ‘bad stuff’ isn’t just meat, it’s saturated fats and sugar in general.
As you might have heard, social media sensation James Charles recently came to Bullring to celebrate the recent opening of the new Morphe store, and for a meet and greet with 250 of his ‘sisterhood’. It’s hard to overestimate James’ popularity – he has 13.8m followers on Instagram and almost 14m subscribers on Youtube. It’s no exaggeration to say that James’ make-up tutorials, challenges and reviews reach more people than the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard and the Daily Mirror combined.
Retail is undoubtedly experiencing a fundamental structural shift, driven by online shopping. Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen well-known brands including House of Fraser, New Look and Maplin fall into administration, while numerous others have significantly cut their store estates.
In that context, it would be easy to conclude that we are witnessing the decline of physical retail. But that’s just not true – it’s more complex than that.
Artificial intelligence (AI), or machine-learning, is rapidly moving from research labs to real world applications. Harnessing its power in a very practical way for energy management within commercial buildings is just one of its potential benefits. Hammerson has been working with a start-up – Grid Edge – to do just that. Grid Edge was spun out of Aston University after being founded by three friends from Aston’s Energy Research Institute.
Offering an “experience” has never been more important. It is no longer enough just to be in the right locations, or even to offer a top product, you need all that and more. You need to deliver something memorable, something different that will live long in the memory (and ideally on Instagram as well). But on the flipside, if you can do all that, there is still huge appetite among consumers to leave the Xbox and Netflix behind and see what you’re doing in the flesh.
