Mall of the Future
Feb 2, 2010 3:16 PM, By Elaine Misonzhnik
What a shopping trip might look like a decade from now.
Imagine it’s 5:00 PM the day before Valentine’s Day and, as always, you forgot to plan something special for your wife. You imagine a nice romantic dinner and a thoughtful gift would do the trick, but there’s barely any time left and you have only a foggy notion of what your wife might like.
Suddenly in a hurry, you wrap up a video chat you’ve been having with a construction manager on site at your company’s latest project and race out the office door. Along the way, you grab your mobile tablet and start frantically scrolling through the touch screen menus to get to your family’s joint shopping channel looking for a list of your wife’s favorite retailers.
She has uploaded her profile to White House | Black Market, Banana Republic and Victoria’s Secret. Through the elevator ride, you peruse her wish lists and purchase history to see if there’s anything she wants or if the retailers can recommend any new items that match her preferences.
As you fumble for your car keys and walk to your car, your search proves fruitful! The White House | Black Market mobile site highlights a slick silk blouse that’s in the same style as a skirt your wife purchased two months ago and that would complement a pair of White House | Black Market shoes she also owns. Since it’s the night before Valentine’s Day, however, you don’t have enough time to buy the blouse online and have it delivered.
Instead, as you ready to start your car, you check out a retail locator application on your tablet to find out which nearby center has a White House | Black Market showroom in it and cross check to see if it has the blouse you want in stock. It looks like the Shops at Winter Village might do the trick, so you begin your drive. As you navigate the evening’s rush hour traffic, you direct the showroom’s mobile concierge to pull your wife’s measurements based on her recent purchases. This gives the store staff an opportunity to sift through their stock and have the right size blouse ready for you to look at by the time you arrive.
As you draw closer to the center, your car’s wireless device pings the real-time parking channel at the center, which plugs precise directions to your mobile GPS on an available parking spot close to the White House | Black Market’s entrance.
As you enter the store, a salesperson is there to meet you, escorting you to an LCD screen that displays a three-dimensional scan of your wife wearing the blouse. A few clicks show you the different color options. Still unsure, you download the images to your tablet and quickly send them to your wife’s sister to ask her opinion about the potential gift. She texts back that your wife would love the blouse in deep blue. The salesperson brings out the blue version in your wife’s size so you can take a look at the actual merchandise.
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Satisfied, you ask for it to be gift-wrapped and pay for your order via payment information stored on your tablet. You pull up the center’s mobile concierge again and arrange for the center’s staff to pick up the wrapped present so you can take a quick spin through the rest of the property and finish your Valentine’s preparations. You still need to find a nice place to have dinner. As you pass a personalized, motion-sensitive advertising display, an image comes into focus offering a 20 percent discount on a dinner for two at Amelio’s, an Italian restaurant you frequently visit. The ad teases you with a dynamically-generated image of you and your wife enjoying steak Pizzaiola, one of your favorite entrees.
Intrigued, you go back to your tablet and check your wife’s schedule. You find out she’ll be getting off work tomorrow at 6:00. You then access Amelio’s mobile site, select a table by the window, make a reservation for 7:00 P.M. and place an advance order for steak Pizzaiola for two. The reservation is simultaneously entered into your wife’s digital schedule.
As a finishing touch, you pull up a digital directory of Winter Village and discover a new florist has opened at the center. You make a quick order and arrange for the mall’s concierge to have a dozen roses waiting at your Amelio’s table tomorrow night. Now that your plans are set, you ask the center’s concierge service to meet you at your car with the wrapped blouse. In all, you complete your shopping trip in less than 20 minutes.
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Sound like a fantasy? It’s true that no mall today is equipped to provide that kind of shopping experience. Yet the technologies that retailers, marketers and shopping center owners are tinkering with today might make this shopping trip of the future feasible sooner than you might think. The advent of the smartphone and other mobile devices in particular could revolutionize retail in the next couple of decades, says Jane Lisy, vice president of marketing in the commercial group of Forest City Enterprises, a Cleveland, Ohio-based diversified real estate owner and manager.“One obvious drive we are seeing is the drive to this one ultimate mobile device, this complete unit that does all the communication that the consumer wants to do,” Lisy notes.
Various mobile devices, from the iPhone to the Kindle to Apple’s iPad tablet computer, promise to change the way we shop and have already begun to have an impact, even with just a fraction of mobile phone owners using them. (Overall, only about 18 percent of the 223 million mobile users in the U.S. are using smartphones, according to Nielsen Co., a global marketing and media information firm.) Still, during the 2009 holiday shopping season, 51 percent of consumers worldwide used their mobile devices for shopping purposes while inside stores, including comparing product prices, looking up coupons and reading product reviews, according to the Motorola 2009 Retail Holiday Season Shopper Study.
Going forward, the use of smartphones and other mobile devices will become more widespread. By 2011, there will be 300 million mobile users in the United States and the number of smartphones will balloon to 150 million, according to Nielsen. In fact, by 2011, smartphone sales will overtake PC purchases, according to a research report from RBC Capital Markets.
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Online retail in this context will not be about people sitting at home at their computers making purchases for delivery rather than visiting brick-and-mortar stores. Instead, mobile devices will blend the virtual and physical shopping experiences in new ways and potentially change how stores and shopping centers are designed, configured and operated.
Enhanced mobile devices could become the primary channel for locating retail properties, browsing retail inventories, pre-ordering store and mall services and making payments. When coupled with other emerging technologies, including video-streaming, face and voice recognition and augmented reality applications, the transition will change the role of the mall from the traditional retail marketplace into something resembling a collection of showrooms, Lisy predicts. The primary function of retail properties will no longer be to facilitate sales transactions—it will be to promote unique experiences and social interaction.
“What we are seeing is the evolution of our developer community from being landlords to being place-makers,” says Paco Underhill, founder of Envirosell Inc., a New York City-based research and consulting firm and author of What We Buy: The Science of Shopping and Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping. “They simply can’t survive by just giving you stores.”
The picture today
Today, smartphone owners can already use applications that enhance mall shopping experiences. A few examples include Point Inside, which provides up-to-date layouts of nearby malls; One Touch Concierge, which makes it possible to order mall services ranging from restaurant reservations to package delivery at participating properties; and ShopSavvy, which allows consumers to compare product prices at various retail outlets.
Still, there are just a handful of these kinds of services available. Instead, retailers and marketers are emphasizing the basics in today’s world—in particular...Continue reading on next page
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