Atterbury sets up firm to gauge consumers

PROPERTY developer Atterbury has established a new technology company to drive its initiative to best understand consumer behaviour at shopping centres by engaging with shoppers through multiple digital media.

Called FATTi, which was coined from the words Wi-Fi and Atterbury, the company is currently in advanced negotiations with a number of different mall owners, such as listed Attacq, to roll out this technology at their various malls.

In the first joint venture, Atterbury and Attacq in December introduced this technology as a pilot project at their new jointly owned R1.3 billion Newtown Junction shopping centre in the Johannesburg central business district. Other shopping centres set to follow include The Grove Mall in Namibia, the Garden Route Mall in George and Lynnwood Bridge Retail in Pretoria.

Adrian Maguire, the manager of FATTi, said the new company had deployed a 100 percent custom-made solution for Atterbury that enabled site analytics and gave Atterbury and their partners’ retail property managers an all-round view of shopping centre performance and customer behaviour.

Maguire said this would help Atterbury to create better shopping experiences, which meant happier customers and resulted in more enjoyable and better performing shopping malls.

“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.

“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,” he said.

Maguire said FATTi’s software combined information from a wide range of sources to provide Atterbury and their partners with a 360 degree view of its business and an insight into untapped opportunities across any single shopping centre or portfolio of retail properties.

“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,” he said.

Maguire added that all Atterbury’s centres and those of their joint venture partners would soon offer retailers the power to unlock more meaningful omni channel shopping experiences by seamlessly merging mall and online retail together.

He said they would also see rewards by ensuring that every square metre of retail space generated the maximum return on investment.