Three cautions when measuring Lifestyle for retail assets

1. Don’t Over Emphasise Spend

The problem:

‍Spend is used as a proxy for experience.

While data around what people spend money on does indicate what they are doing, it will often miss other key lifestyle values, such as cycling with kids, or a picnic with friends, or a trip to the car-boot sale.

These other ‘non-spending’ activities can be the most important parts of people’s day, and even why they chose to visit a location in the first place.  If you’re looking at spend as the main indicator of lifestyle values, then you may miss an opportunity to build visitor loyalty through non spend activities.

What to consider instead:

• What do local people love to do?
• What is important to their lives?
• How do they love to socialise?
• Where do they spend time?
• What activities do they love to do?

Our solution:

Our Lifestyle Values Tool enables you to use local chatter to understand what locals value. Read more about our Lifestyle Values Tool.

Create a free account to view a sample of our Lifestyle Values Tool.

Don’t Only Look Inside Your Centre

The problem:
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You assume the shopping centre is the main neighbourhood attraction.

While it may be true that retail centres are the activity hub within a local neighbourhood, great retail attractions often enable a network of other local amenities to spring up.

And these amenities can become a key reason to visit; the main-street dining precinct, nearby late-night medical centre, or even adjacent recreation reserve can become beloved local attractions, and the top reasons people visit a neighbourhood.

If you’re only examining the amenities inside your centre, you may miss an opportunity to collaborate with a neighbouring amenity, and drive more visitation to the neighbourhood.

What to consider instead:

• What amenities attract people to the neighbourhood?
• Are they coming for recreation, services or employment?
• How does the offer change across the day or week?
  
  

Our solution:

Our Amenity Mapping Tool enables you to examine a comprehensive map of amenities across the local neighbourhood, ranked by how important the amenity is to local visitors.
Read more about our Amenity Mapping Tool.

Create a free account to use the Amenity Mapping Tool on a suburb of interest.

3. Don’t Look At Your Centre In Isolation

The problem:

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You think it’s too hard or expensive to benchmark your centre against other locations.

Historically it was slow and expensive to get data insights across a region.

Examining the visitor flow across your entire trade area, or benchmarking your centre against other local competitors was often out of reach for most centre managers. And the concept of comparing an entire portfolio of assets was an undertaking that required buy-in and participation from numerous internal stakeholders.

But these days digital data has made it much easier to access local, regional and national data sets to instantly compare performance.

If you’re not comparing your centre’s performance to other centres, then you won’t learn your location’s unique value proposition.

What to consider instead:

• Easy comparison of lifestyle results across a region, or between centres.
• What other locations across my trade area are hotspots of activity?
• Which suburbs within my trade area do my competitors attract visitors from?

Our solution:

Our platforms enables you to utilise our database of over 9,300 Local Neighbourhood Reports to instantly compare your asset to other locations.

Create a free account to generate a Local Neighbourhood Report for any suburb of interest in Australia.

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