GIVING A VALUE TO THIS IMPULSE VS DESTINATION RATIO

Your business can normally be addressed as X per cent impulse; Y per cent destination and I shall give some examples.

As you can see, the more premeditated the purchase, the higher the probability you will look up where you want to go, not just spontaneously make a purchase from the first store you see.

Finding the right spot in a shopping centre is highly important, and not sufficiently researching the footfall can result in a poor site selection.

Researching this is simple, but it takes time. You can buy and use small people-counters and then stand and measure in five- or 10-minute time slots the number of people walking past the proposed location. Go and do that in a few different areas in a shopping centre, and gain clarity on which are the busy and quiet areas.

The devil is in the detail, and the negatives of shopping centres are the rent and the rental increase clauses, often at around two or three per cent above inflation.

What is going to happen at the end of the rental/lease period? Shopping centres are not obliged to renew leases, and they have significant powers to enforce major upgrades or reimaging the store – at your cost.