Serving the Post-Pandemic Consumer
Developers and operators of open-air, neighborhood, and community shopping centers always have had a finger on the local neighborhood’s pulse. The best operators recognize their community’s needs and merchandise their centers with complementary offerings that strengthen the property’s overall experience for both the consumer and the merchant. That expertise and local knowledge are critical in how operators will help redefine how the post-pandemic consumer is served. Since the pandemic, consumers have re-prioritized many aspects of their lives. To serve them, we must understand who they are today and what’s important to them.
Pre-COVID, we were already seeing trends that emphasized the importance of efficiency and convenience for the consumer. The shutdowns have helped accelerate these trends. Today’s consumers desire convenient, close, and now safe access to their retail needs. At Regency, we are fortunate to have necessity, service, convenience, and value-based retailers serving our communities’ essential needs. As such, our properties remained open and operating during the entirety of the shutdowns. This essential retail and the freedom of open space in centers like ours provide our merchants with a platform to try new things and reach new customers during the disruption safely and conveniently. Importantly, it has given us opportunities to support them in creative new ways.
Early on, it became clear that we needed to tap into digital tools to alert our consumers to essential physical retail that was open in their neighborhoods. We quickly used social media and map platforms to connect with consumers with this information. The operator’s role in providing reliable information to consumers about the location, open hours, and retail available at their center via digital channels is critical for our smaller merchants’ success.
TOOLS FOR RETAILERS. Those smaller merchants may not have the same capabilities as the larger regional and national retailers who can tap into these tools. We are proud of our relationship with directory listing services, maps platforms, and social media platforms and leveraged these tools to ensure that customers knew what was open and when.
Our team also created convenient, easy-to-access areas for pick-up of these essential goods and services early on. As the pandemic continued, these temporary spaces became permanent spaces for curbside pick-up. We are now piloting programs that use digital apps that connect to our merchants’ POS and kitchen management terminals. These apps will accurately notify merchants when customers are arriving. We believe that a quick, convenient shopping center experience will be a win-win for our merchants and their customers moving forward. Shopping center owners should think about the design of their parking fields and their use of outdoor and gathering spaces to serve consumer needs more effectively.
Going forward, merchants will also need to be creative in using tools to stay relevant, nimble, and actively engaged with their customers. Those who already have a strong social media presence and customer database are ahead. For those merchants that are not actively using such tools, operators can connect their merchants with this. In that vein, Regency has provided our tenants with a Merchant Success Toolkit. This toolkit features 60 pages of marketing tools that help establish a strong marketing foundation, elevate market position, and amplify merchant offerings to customers.
As we look to the future, we expect people to learn from this experience and form new habits. But we still believe that a physical presence is a critical component of retailers’ omnichannel strategy. And the proximity of shopping centers to consumers’ homes is critical to future success as shoppers will want to take care of all their retail and dining needs convenient and close to their neighborhoods.
People will want to return to social activities with friends and family, and neighborhood shopping centers with outdoor spaces for dining and other group activities will provide the gathering place to meet that demand. While we don’t know when this will happen, we know that our commitments to our neighborhoods and retailers remain as we navigate the pandemic. We know, too, that open-air, neighborhood and community shopping centers will thrive in the “new normal” as operators and retailers work together to connect with our communities while being adaptable, safe, and creative.
Lisa Palmer is the President and CEO of Regency Centers.