Marketing urban places …

… and making them more attractive for customers when they shop there.

Urban shopping venues – also called retail agglomerations – include, for example high streets, and inner-city store clusters. They are an important feature of what an urban place has to offer, and thus contribute to the overall attractiveness of a town or a city.

Such agglomerations have become under pressure from out-of-town retail centres, such as shopping malls or retail parks, as well as online retailing.

Research by Professor Christoph Teller (University of Surrey, England) and Professor Jonathan Elms (Massey University, New Zealand) in the Journal of Marketing Management looks into what makes urban shopping venues attractive for a very specific “place user group” – the actual shopper.

By surveying more than 500 actual customers at the time they visited a particular town centre for the purposes of shopping, we identify those features and attributes that make this particular place attractive for them.

Our results show that that the retail tenant mix, the merchandise value, and the atmosphere had a direct impact, and the product range and the sales personnel an indirect impact upon the evaluation of attractiveness.

Furthermore, a number of additional effects towards these antecedents were identified with respect to parking conditions, the non-retail tenant mix, manoeuvrability, and orientation.

Our theoretical discussion and empirical findings reveal:

• the crucial role of retailing for urban place attractiveness
• the supportive and guiding role of place marketing for urban retailing
• the lower importance of structural disadvantages of urban shopping venues compared to e.g. shopping malls.

The practical implication of these findings suggests that place marketing activities should be proactive in supporting and enabling retailers in fulfilling their roles.

More research related to the topic of urban place marketing and management can be found on the authors’ own websites (see links below) and of course in the Journal of Marketing Management.

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