Shopping malls set to steal limelight from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart

Shopping malls in India may soon steal the limelight from digital advertising and e-commerce platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon and Flipkart that are used by Indian and global consumer brands to target shoppers.

Taking the ‘phygital’ platform route, mall owners are expected to make significant investments to not just be relevant, but also stay a step ahead of their digital counterparts by offering real-time insights/data to brands being housed inside their premises. The data generated will thus be utilised by brands/retailers to target customers with attractive and compelling offers for increasing sales.

Pioneering the platform in India is realty major DLF’s shopping mall business vertical that also operates the country’s largest shopping destination ‘DLF Mall of India’ in Noida. The company is unveiling its phygital platform ‘Lukout’ (a mobile application) at the two-day India Retail Forum (IRF) currently going on in Mumbai.

The idea, according to Harshavardhan Chauhan, head - central marketing and phygital, DLF Shopping Malls, is to help brand/retail partners increase sales using big data points that will be made available to them real-time.

“Say if a shopper steps out of a Zara or an H&M store, the big data will be able to understand and predict/estimate where else s/he is likely to go next based on past patterns. Accordingly, alerts will be sent to brands/outlets that can then interest the shopper with a customised offering (on the Lukout mobile application), thereby increasing the conversion possibilities.

“Another interesting feature of the platform is that brands will be able to know (through heat map data) how many people are inside the store and how many are outside in the immediate vicinity. Based on this real-time data, stores will be able to put together activities to get these customers into the stores and make a purchase,” said Chauhan, adding that brands will be able to view (through back-end dashboards) and tweak their call to action, storefront, looks, offers and so on to appeal/ attract customers based on comparative data insights and boost sales.

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The Lukout platform will allow brands to create an offer, decide who they want to reach, at what time of the day, which location of the mall and send it across to the target audience. “The targeted/segmented communication can be sent in the most personalised fashion with precision marketing directly to the consumers in real time. So if Zara had to reach 10 million consumers in Delhi, they would resort to digital marketing through Google, Facebook ads as traditional marketing would not be effective.

Source: DNA Money