Newtown Junction in the Joburg CBD – the first Atterbury mall where the FATTi solution went live in December 2014 and is currently being piloted.
Atterbury has announced the creation of a new technology company to drive its initiative to best understand consumer behaviour at shopping centres, by engaging with customers through multiple digital media.
The new company is called FATTi, coined by combining the words Wi-Fi and Atterbury, and is managed by Adrian Maguire. Negotiations are currently at an advanced stage with a number of different mall owners, such as Attacq, to roll out this technology at their various malls.
FATTi has deployed a solution that enables site analytics, giving Atterbury and their partners’ retail property managers an all-round view of shopping centre performance and customer behaviour. This will help it create better shopping experiences, which means happier customers. The result: better enjoyed and better performing shopping malls.
Maguire says: “In simple terms, never before has it been so easy to connect with specific visitor groupings. Promotions can be targeted at specific audiences, grouped by age, gender, interest, location and even the times they visit a shopping centre. Essentially we are merging the best of retail shopping with the best of online shopping.”
He adds: “We know that it’s more important than ever for retail property professionals to be led by consumer changes. Fierce competition from Internet and other shopping channels, coupled with the increasing expectation for a memorable shopping experience, means that shopping centres need to do better to succeed. Those that monitor and respond to emerging customer patterns have the best chance of outperforming.”
By forming FATTi, Atterbury is poised to manage the changing environment in shopping centres.
FATTi’s cutting edge cloud-based software combines information from a wide range of sources, to provide Atterbury an unprecedented 360-degree view of Atterbury’s business. It also gives a unique insight into untapped opportunities across any single shopping centre, and for Atterbury and their partners’ entire portfolio of retail properties.
Maguire adds: “By deploying this software or APP, with the necessary hardware through our centres, a broad range of metrics become available to our centre managers. With this, they can quickly calculate immediate priorities for attention, revealing previously unnoticed performance patterns and enabling sharper decisions.”
This is a 100% custom-made solution for Atterbury, developed by combining the talents of market leaders in different disciplines to create a single value proposition, which starts and ends with the customer.
The value proposition uses information from a mall’s end-users, to create completely personalised solutions that deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time.
Combining the social benefits of the shopping environment and private digital channels, the bricks-and-mortar mall and its retailers, can now effortlessly interact with visitors and potential visitors within the mall catchment area.
Thanks to FATTi, customers at Atterbury and their respective partners’ malls will be the ultimate winners.
In the first joint venture, Atterbury and Attacq recently introduced this technology at their new jointly-owned R1.3 billion Newtown Junction shopping centre in the Joburg CBD. Newtown Junction became the first mall where the FATTi solution went live in December 2014.
FATTi is being piloted at Newtown Junction and the initial results have been good. Other shopping centres set to follow, include The Grove mall in Namibia, followed by Garden Route Mall and Lynnwood Bridge Retail in Pretoria.
Retailers at malls where FATTi is set to be introduced will benefit greatly too. Soon, all Atterbury’s centres and those of their FATTi joint venture partners will offer retailers the power to unlock more meaningful omnichannel shopping experiences, by seamlessly merging mall and online retail together.
“By allowing visitors to register and download the mall application, Atterbury and their partners can offer their tenants the true benefit and convenience of loyalty-based promotions, discount tokens, Mobile online payment for parking and access to world-class Wi-Fi. This is a typical package, but benefits can be varied for each shopping centre. The APP is optimised for iPhone and Android, with Windows next in line,” notes Maguire.
Atterbury and their partners will also see rewards, by ensuring every square metre of retail space generates the maximum return on investment.
Says Maguire: “Attracting visitor volumes simply isn’t enough. With FATTi, we aim to encourage a steady flow of traffic around every area of any centre.”
Maguire adds: “The next step is taking FATTi to market systematically. We’re looking at an aggressive roll-out that, at first, focuses on shopping centres larger than 25,000sqm. Of course, FATTi offers value for all sizes of shopping centres and even mixed used developments, but the benefits of analytics are exponential for larger malls, so this is the best place to start.”
