Consumers throughout Southeast Asia have high expectations when it comes to their overall shopping experience, according to CBRE’s first even consumer survey.
The firm interviewed 11,000 consumers in 11 major cities across the Asia-Pacific region to discover where and how they shop for non-food items such as clothing, shoes, accessories, skin care products and electronics goods – particularly in relation to their changing behaviour and expectations of different types of shopping destinations.
As well as noting consumers in the region have high expectations of the overall shopping experience, the survey also found that Asia-Pacific consumers share very similar preferences – affordability, cleanliness and security ranked as the most valued factors among all age groups.
Entertainment facilities turned out to be less important versus the ‘basic’ ingredients of price, cleanliness and security. Given the contemporary shopping centres increasingly focus on food services, entertainment services and events designed to create compelling experiences for shoppers, this outcome might seem disappointing.
Dung Duong, Head of the CBRE Research and Consulting Department, Vietnam, commented that although the outlook of the brick-and-mortar format still remains upbeat, shopping centre operators must be aware of the challenges posed by online retail.
This is crucial for shopping centre management and related areas such as marketing.
According to the CBRE survey, in the next two years 25 percent of respondents expect to shop less often in a store. Between 45 percent and 50 percent of respondents said that they would shop online via desktop/laptop or smartphone/tablet more often than they do now.
It is surprising that an even greater proportion of consumers (69 percent) aged from 55 to 64 actually think that they would use their smartphone/tablet more frequently to buy non-food items, noted CBRE.
The real estate firm suggested that retailers and landlords do more online selling and advertising via social media and their well-customised Business-to-Customer (B2C) websites.
In addition, CBRE recommended that landlords adapt their strategy to boost both e-commerce and offline business activities by leveraging “big data”, which can track levels of consumer engagement, implement Online-to-Offline (O2O) strategies, and create simple and useful applications for those who want to shop via their smartphone/tablet.
Andrew Batt, International Group Editor of PropertyGuru Group, wrote this story. To contact him about this or other stories email andrew@propertyguru.com.sg
