The largest retail developer in the Middle East wanted to better understand the environment within which their malls were operating and more importantly the reasons behind why the shoppers were coming to the malls time and time again. Although our client's malls are the most frequented shopping venues, with some of the highest footfall in the region; the client had limited insight with respect to the socio-demographic and retail psychographics of its shoppers. This severely limited its ability to effectively design and market its product and service portfolio.
The grmc solution
In Yr 2004 the client approached grmc to undertake an annual research study and Trade Area Analysis report for one of their assets. At the time, the mall was rapidly becoming the centre-piece of Dubai’s emerging retail sector and with the assistance of grmc, the client was able to fully understand the market position that their mall occupied. Since this groundbreaking original study, grmc has been retained as the client's preferred supplier of this work on an annual basis, to the point where grmc now undertakes this work across their entire portfolio comprising a dozen malls across the Middle East.
Results achieved
Taking inspiration and lessons learned from global best-practice grmc has been able to deliver a consistently better product for its Mall Benchmark Studies across the client’s ever expanding mall portfolio. The client now uses our Mall Benchmark Reports to understand key metrics such as shopper penetration, market-share and trade area cannabalisation, as well as the shifting consumer trends that impact its mall leasing decisions. Additionally, as the reports are used across multiple disciplines they also impact the way in which the malls market their property.
Building on the success of these Mall Benchmark Reports and the strong working relationship that has been established because of them, grmc has also worked on many new mall feasibility projects, rollout strategies, market entry strategies, geo-spatial mapping, and developed proprietary gravity and regression models for the client.