Mass Culture
What shopping centers can learn from museums
Author Sophia Schukina, Marketing & Communications Business Partner, Ceetrus Russia
I am going to talk about such a phenomenon as pop-up here, on the pages of Shopping Centers Russia, and how to utilize this tool while working with museums. Pop-up is about replacing the content, improving the selling points of your offer, strengthening the position of your project; it is not just an exhibition or festival to fit an empty space. Customers claim that choosing a shopping center or a store to visit is not finding what you want for the price that you want at an easy to reach location. What they care about is new decorations and interesting events instead of a chain of adverts on “gender holidays”, sales and Christmas parties. Remember: a shopping center does not only sell the space to the tenants, it also sells people flow, the very people, who can get attracted providing we organize something interesting.
Museum coming alive
Do you know what the worst compliment for a developer could be? “Your project is great but it looks too much like a museum.” The sentiment includes the grandeur of the building, an ambitions concept, a magnificent finishing, yet it reflects the bitterness of a monument with no interactive component and unfortunately not many customers.
The Hermitage, the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert Museum — each of them has had a long life and are bound to outlive us for centuries but unlike the shopping centers, they started changing their approach to visitors 20 years ago and many best museums have managed to become the most interesting educational and entertaining businesses with an effective commercial component. As well as competitors to shopping centers. This is the reason why the comment on a certain similarity between a shopping center and a museum must be noted and modern marketing must pick up some wisdom from these cultural institutions because modern museum marketing is nothing but “marketing of ideas and impressions” per ce. Indeed, museums are very close relatives to shopping centres and department stores as they have similar KPIs