Festival Place Shopping Centre
Festival Place, a leading shopping centre situated in the centre of Basingstoke with over 140 major brands, aimed to cement its position as the destination that provides the very best leisure and retail offering for its visitors and consumers.
Through a turbulent era for the retail industry, Festival Place needed to better understand the changing demands of its consumers, in order to make strategic decisions that would remain nimble to evolving trends.
Key Benefits
- Footfall
Track footfall both in-store and out-of-store in real-time at ≥98% accuracy using the latest AI technology - Benchmarking data
Allows comparisons to other UK High Streets - Vacancy Rate Reports
Put your vacancy rate into context both at a regional and national level to adapt and thrive
The Problem
The major challenge was having a comprehensive understanding of visitors and how they used the Centre during their visits. Being able to analyse footfall data in granular detail provided clarity on key strategic business decisions to ensure that Festival Place remained agile. Due to the evolving demands of consumers looking for everything from retail, leisure and hospitality in a consistently changing industry, a more in-depth look into shopper trends was vital.
The Solution
MRI provided the insights for a valuable data-driven approach to decision making. The MRI OnLocation Analyser was used to break down footfall data on a week-on-week and month-on-month level in order to gauge trends in any given period on demand.
MRI tailored its dashboard to the needs of the Centre. This allowed Festival Place to better understand retailers’ performance, and identify where additional support was required to ensure the Centre continues to be a thriving business community. The insights and data allowed Festival Place to position itself as an innovative and proactive partner to the 140 major brands and retailers within the premises, helping to advise on ways to ensure positive sales and footfall growth for each individual business.
Furthermore, MRI intelligence-enabled Festival Place to make key strategic decision on major launch dates and event timings as well as locations for pop-up stores. By understanding how customers behave within the Centre, Festival Place was able to benchmark its own success and overcome any challenges in the future.
Through a seven-year partnership, the shopping centre is now able to analyse historic data to have a better understanding of how customers are changing and interacting with the retail offering. This has helped the Centre benchmark its performance in order to make informed investment decisions and dissect how Festival Place can best add value to the customer experience.
The Results
Through the partnership with MRI Software, in 2020, Festival Place introduced live occupancy counts providing its occupiers with real-time data during the challenges of government restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. These footfall data sets were readily available on the website and meant the Centre could proactively plan and react to the live retail environment. It also brought peace of mind to visitors that the Centre is a retail location that put its customers’ needs and priorities to the forefront of focus
Prior to this, Festival Place has also utilised MRI resources to launch monthly affordability reporting, which allowed the Centre to analyse footfall and sales for key areas of business. Furthermore, data was captured and analysed specifically for the restaurant quarter which highlighted consumer dwell time and motivations in order to continue to deliver strong footfall for the food offering.
We have worked closely with MRI Software for a number of years because they are professional, friendly, responsive and ahead of their competitors, especially for industry benchmarking.
Business Performance Manager, Festival Place
