Tyger Valley Shopping Centre exterior
Pareto’s Tyger Valley Shopping Centre won the top award – The Spectrum Award – at the South African Council of Shopping Centres’ (SACSC) Footprint Marketing Awards.
Tyger Valley Shopping Centre is co-owned and marketed by South Africa’s premier shopping centre investor, Pareto, which scooped no less than eight Footprint Awards for its in-house shopping centre marketing. In addition it won a further 11 Footprint Awards for the marketing undertaken in its portfolio of leading retail assets by external marketing companies.
Award winners were announced at the SACSC’s 19th Annual Congress in Durban, and are given in recognition of exceptional shopping centre marketing, innovation and creative achievements, with economic success.
Marius Muller, CEO of Pareto, comments: “We are completely thrilled with our performance at the Footprint Awards. Besides claiming the grand prize, shopping centres in the Pareto portfolio won 19 of the total 48 awards presented. This demonstrates the importance Pareto places on creating uniquely enjoyable experiences for our shoppers, quality support for our retailers, delivering performance for our stakeholders and transforming South African society.”
Pareto owns an unmatched portfolio of regional and super-regional shopping centres. Besides being the full owner of Cresta Shopping Centre, Southgate Mall and Value Market, and Westgate Regional Shopping Centre, all in Johannesburg; and Menlyn Park Shopping Centre in the East of Pretoria, it also wholly owns The Pavilion in Durban; and Mimosa Mall in Bloemfontein. In Cape Town, Pareto co-owns Tyger Valley Shopping Centre. Pareto also holds 25% of Sandton City and its surrounding assets including three high-rise office blocks, the Sandton Convention Centre and three hotels: The Sandton Sun, The InterContinental Johannesburg Sandton Towers and Sandton Garden Court.
Tyger Valley Centre earned the coveted Spectrum Award for its “Christmas in Africa”, which saw it take refreshing proudly South African approach to its festive décor and, at the same time, empowering unskilled or unemployed women by teaching them crafting skills to sustain themselves. Tyger Valley Centre’s “Christmas in Africa” won a Gold Footprint Award in the Community Relations category, to qualify as a finalist for the Spectrum Award.
Three of the seven Gold Footprint Marketing Awards went to shopping centres in the Pareto portfolio. All three will go to compete in the International Council of Shopping Centres’ Solal Awards, to be judged early in 2016.
In addition to Tyger Valley Centre’s golden gong, Menlyn Park Shopping Centre won a gold title for its “Paris Hilton’s Closet” advertising campaign, undertaken by Primedia Lifestyle. Pareto’s ground-breaking new corporate social investment initiative, NuMiracle, also earned a gilded trophy. The project is aimed at improving unacceptably low levels of numeracy in the country, and is undertaken by Mustard Seed Relationship Marketing.
Pareto co-owns Sandton City, which was the shopping centre to take home the most honours overall at the awards, a total of six Footprints, and is marketed by Marketing Concepts.
In addition, the Pareto Retail Tenant Support Programme, undertaken in-house by Pareto Property Management, was the only initiative to win an award in the Retailer Productivity category, which is for projects designed to benefit retailers by improving store productivity, ultimately leading to improved centre performance.
Muller says: “Retaining and growing market share is a big focus for malls in today’s highly competitive retail environment. For shopping centres, this means moving more people into our malls every day. To do this, we need to provide compelling spaces and experiences that really entice shoppers. Pareto wants to give people more reasons to visit malls, and more to enjoy during their visits. So, we’re actively creating more compelling attractions for people to visit our centres and excellent marketing is key in achieving this.”
The SACSC Footprint Marketing Awards are a benchmark of retail marketing innovation and marketing talent in South Africa and receive floods of entries each year. They consider each marketing campaign’s strategy and objectives, creativity, implementation, cost-effectiveness and impact. The awards are judged to a global standard and are comparable with top shopping campaigns worldwide.