UK-based Toolbox Marketing, specialists in retail and shopping centre marketing, show how a proactive retailer relations programme can reap huge rewards – to the benefit of landlords, centres, retailers and an ever-increasing band of grateful shoppers. Michelle Buxton MD of Toolbox Marketing says ‘We are involved in marketing shopping centres all over the world – whatever the economic climate, and it is clearly currently difficult in Europe, I see time and time again how a coherent and inclusive retailer relations programme benefits all concerned. Retailers reflect a hugely valuable, and often untapped, resource’.

One centre who have recently reaped the benefits of Toolbox Marketing’s on-going retailer relations programme is the iconic 1970’s-built Brunswick in central London. A relatively small consumer event took on gargantuan proportions when give-away Party Bags worth a staggering £34,000 were amassed. The total reflected an increase on the total event spend of over 400%.

The majority of the items given away were from the retailers within the centre, and varied from £5 vouchers up to sophisticated beauty products. Lisa Skilton, Toolbox Marketing executive in charge of the Brunswick retailer relations programme, found her initial talks to retailers within the centre reaped immediate rewards. ‘The vast majority of the thirty five stores were able to commit immediately – whether that was by donating items for the goody bags, committing resources to the event or agreeing to run their own concurrent activity. It obviously helps that I know each of the retailers well having spent a year working on this account already, but I am always surprised by how generous and supportive the retailers are to events that we run in-centre. I think they appreciate the fact that we are all aiming for the same thing – that is, contented shoppers who keep coming back to the Brunswick with nice fat wallets in their pockets which they wish to lighten!’

An additional benefit gleaned from an easy communication existing between marketing agency and retailer is, as Lisa explains, that ‘we can often tie our event planning in to a specific promotion that one of the retailers is conducting – often at head office level. The Brunswick event, for instant, connected well with a Superdrug Shunburn campaign which they were rolling out nationally at the time – we benefited enormously from the promotional items and publicity that they were able to commit to our local event’.

As well as taking advantage of these national head office campaigns, Toolbox Marketing also looked beyond the centre itself for contributors to the event. The Brunswick is in central London but is slightly set back from the road and is in many ways a hidden treasure in need of discovery. Lisa Skilton knew it was important to involve as many local businesses as possible who weren’t in direct competition with centre retailers but who could offer services complimentary to the event. Thus it was that the grateful recipients of the £34,000 worth of goodies found Elemis treatment vouchers, Cannons gym memberships, Eastman Dental treatment vouchers and Pilates sessions tucked within their Brunswick-branded bags.

Centre manager David Plumb says ‘Shoppers really appreciated the give-aways and I’ve been inundated with requests from both retailers and consumers as to when the next Brunswick event is going to be staged. As a promotional event, it really could not have gone better. To have achieved that on such a limited budget was phenomenal’.

Retailer feedback from the event was equally positive. A marked upturn in footfall was allied with comments such as ‘sales were up £1,000’, ‘one of our busiest ever days – great!’, ‘we cleared nearly all our sale stock’ and, most telling of all ‘please, please, please can we be more involved in the next event!’.


Good retailer relations, then, make life easier for centre management teams and can make budgets stretch significantly further. A recent fashion show at the Haymarket shopping centre in Leicester was supported by retailers to the tune of donating clothes worth £3,349.72 and prizes worth £500. And it is not just at the larger events such as these that clients of Toolbox Marketing reap the benefits of its retailer relations programme. The Swan Centre’s Halloween pumpkin-carving workshops can be run on a tight budget thanks to pumpkins donated by Tesco and candles by Robert Dyas; the Haymarket’s ‘Design a T-shirt’ workshop has T-Shirts donated by Primark for its canvases; and Culver Square’s Back to School Trails are supported by an enthusiastic team at Build-A-Bear who freely provide bears, mascots and bonhomie .

Michelle Buxton is adamant that retailer relations are indeed the ‘hidden assets’ of any shopping centre and need to be taken care of. Having been, at various stages of her career prior to setting up Toolbox Marketing, a retail manager, centre manager and regional marketing manager, she is better placed than most to appreciate what it is that makes shopping centre marketing successful.

‘Many economies in the world are hurting right now’ she says. ‘Consumers are busy tightening their belts so it is imperative that shopping centres make full use of their natural assets to get maximum benefit from their marketing spend. By engaging retailers and encouraging them to become an integral part of your promotional campaigns, it is possible to maximise your marketing budget. And that, in this day and age, is exactly what’s needed’.


For more information, please contact:

Sarah Mountford
01359 208250
sarah@toolboxmarketing.co.uk
Toolbox Marketing, Vine Farm, Bardwell,
Bury St Edmunds IP31 1AA,UK
www.toolboxmarketing.co.uk

Toolbox Marketing has branch offices in London, Stockholm and Helsinki. Further details of the company are on www.toolboxmarketing.co.uk
UK-based Sarah Mountford is a former freelance journalist who wrote primarily for national broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph before moving into PR. She now works part-time for Toolbox Marketing.