Commercialisation: Essential for Successful Destination Management

The Commercialisation profession is an essential part of successful destination management. Consumers are expecting and demanding unique experiences from their visits and commercialisation units offer a great solution to this.

Commercialisation units allow centres to continuously diversify their offering, bringing new brands, products, and events to ensure the local community enjoy a unique experience on every visit.  They allow centres to react to current trends quickly and in a unique manner. One of the great things about pop-up stores is, because of their short life-span, they often create a lot of hype and high sales due to the exclusivity and limited availability of the product. If the product creates an experience or has something that is photographable and shareable, consumers will post on their personal social media channels, creating personalised promotion which is often much more highly regarded than brand promotion.

Any seasonal trends or big events such as the Olympics, Wimbledon or National Holidays offer great opportunities to create an exciting, relevant experience. Recently we saw the Royal Wedding bring heaps of wedding merchandise and events in shopping centres, enhancing the experience and really engaging with visitors.

The flexibility, lack of commitment required and limited investment, makes them really appealing, especially for brands with restricted capital! Fast fashion trends or ‘fads’ which are often extremely popular in their respected time but do pass and fizzle away are often perfect products for pop-up units.

Experiential F&B units are becoming increasingly more common, especially with healthy eating and veganism becoming increasingly more popular, the need for a diverse mix to cater for different dietary requirements is essential. Recently there has been ‘national vegetarian week’, ‘national biscuit day’ and various other food celebrations which deliver opportunities for centres to integrate themes into their marketing and commercialisation campaigns. These events allow schemes to test the market and see what the footfall respond to, delivering data to analyse what new tenants should be targetted.

Shopping centres and retail parks offer great promotional opportunities for businesses to display temporary units to showcase a new product, service or even launch a new brand into a market. Commercialisation teams have the opportunity (and responsibility) to select brands that the footfall will respond well to, and consistently have a pipeline of companies to ensure space is used effectively!