Source | New Retail Business Review
"Shopping in the mall, not buying" is becoming one of the alternative entertainment activities in the leisure time of the public. Some netizens summarized the unified process of contemporary consumers visiting shopping malls:
01 Buy a cup of milk tea, do market research on advanced miniso products, hairpin cute cards, put down; The hat looks good, put it down; Knead and beat all the stuffed animals and put them down.
02 Go to Uniqlo, ZARA, UR to review clothes, take photos and check in, take good-looking photos and search Taobao Pingti, and even 1688 homologous manufacturers, go to Muji to get various products and let friends guess the price, but don't buy it.
03 went to minus one, minus two or the top floor to eat, and before leaving, he "religiously" scratched a lottery ticket, and he didn't win a dime but did charity.
It can be intuitively felt that the public's desire to consume is decreasing, shopping has become more and more procedural and boring, and some shopping malls are gradually living into "tears of the times". Nowadays, any commercial real estate consulting company and shopping mall planning and design company gives optimization suggestions to shopping malls, which is nothing more than to make adjustments in the direction of enriching and interesting shopping and meeting more needs of consumers.
In the past two years, various formats such as crane machines, video games and e-sports, recycling of second-hand luxury goods, KTV, billiard halls, zoos, and equestrian venues have entered shopping malls, especially after the epidemic, many health-related formats are in the limelight and are pouring into shopping malls intensively.
There is a collective influx of care brands
"In the industry, these formats are collectively referred to as 'nursing', in fact, they have always existed, but now community-based and benchmark-type commercial bodies are also stationed."
Tick (pseudonym), who has been engaged in commercial real estate for more than ten years, believes that it is not new for nursing brands to enter shopping malls, but she also laments that it is normal for nursing products to appear in major shopping malls.
Taking a Wanda Plaza in Shanghai as an example, there are a total of 3 floors on the ground, of which there is a traditional Chinese medicine store on the top floor, diagonally opposite to the two fences that have not yet been renovated, one is a small station with tendons, which reads "Tendon dialing for half an hour, refreshing all day", and the other reads "Grass Making Hall - Herbal Experience Center", providing hair nourishment, body nourishment, soothing and stress reduction services.
Photo by New Retail Business Review
The retail gentleman couldn't help but sigh: "Good guy, the content of health elements in the mall is so high now!" ”
After a careful investigation, it was found that the first shopping mall store was opened in Shanghai at the end of February this year, and now it has been stationed in 4 shopping malls in Shanghai.
At the same time, in the process of research, RetailJun also found that not only in Shanghai, but also in many places across the country, many commercial entities have emerged in a variety of different types of nursing formats. RetailJun divides them into 4 categories, namely physiotherapy, basic health, medical health and medical beauty.
Specifically, physiotherapy includes tendon pulling, moxibustion, head therapy, salt therapy, etc.; Health care includes hair care and face washing; Medical and health categories include foot correction, neck care, etc.; The medical cosmetology category includes medical cosmetology stores including Xiaoyang Medical Cosmetology, Heyan Mepa, and ES Medical Cosmetology, and there are various types under subdivision.
All kinds of care stores in the mall, picture source Xiaohongshu
According to the latest statistics of SCPG Group, the proportion of brand store area in the pan-health format (covering medical health, personal care, sports and health) of its projects has increased year by year in the past three years. Among them, the number of new stores opened by pan-health brands in 2021 increased by 28% year-on-year compared with 2020.
Ni Bao, the general manager of Wuhan Qingshan Impression City project, also said that in the future, the shopping center will not only introduce more subdivided health formats, but also deeply integrate with pan-health formats through the membership system.
Everybody loves health
The pan-health format can enter the shopping mall in a big way, and it is inseparable from the changes in consumer habits. Randomly ask the people around you what they pay more attention to after the epidemic, and health must be indispensable.
According to the "National Health Trend Insight Report in the Post-Epidemic Era (2023)" released by the Zhongkang Consumer Research Center, 47.3% of respondents still consider increasing health consumption spending in the future in the case of epidemic recovery. Residents' demand for health has progressed from "not being easy to get sick" to achieving comprehensive health.
As consumer demand changes, so does the direction of consumption in the market. For example, there is a trend of health preservation in the tea market, with bottled beverages soaked in water from the whole root of ginseng, and various ready-made tea brands with peach gum, white fungus, wolfberry, etc. as raw materials. According to the "2020-2021 Chinese New Tea Industry Development Report" released by NCBD, more than 30% of consumers will consider its health level when choosing milk tea.
The demand for health and wellness is reflected not only in tea, but also in a variety of food products. "I always look at the ingredient list when I buy and eat now, and try to choose a cleaner ingredient list for similar foods, which can reassure me." Xiao H (pseudonym), a white-collar worker who has graduated for 3 years, clearly perceives the change in himself.
In the food industry, the symbol of natural, additive-free clean label is valued by well-known companies including Danone and Nestle, and more consumers.
On the other hand, according to the "2023 Consumer Trend Insight Report", during the Spring Festival this year, more than 1,700 nutrition and health care brands doubled their turnover year-on-year. Recently, related topics such as "young people go to traditional Chinese medicine hospitals with sour plum soup" and "sour plum soup in Zhejiang Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine are in short supply" have appeared on the hot search list on multiple platforms.
Based on this, shopping malls that locate residents' leisure and entertainment spaces and solve the daily needs of consumers will naturally not let go of the general trend of health.
At present, the combination of shopping malls and consumer health needs is mainly divided into three categories. In addition to the introduction of nursing and health formats, the first is to set up natural green landscaping in the venue, such as the 5-storey ecological botanical garden built by Shanghai Nanxiang Impression City MEGA, and the three-dimensional vertical botanical garden created by Chongqing Halo Shopping Mall; Another category is the introduction of sports and fitness venues, including running tracks, basketball courts, skateboarding venues and other residents' leisure sports scenes.
What's more, there are also links with professional hospitals to open community hospitals under the hospital in community shopping malls.
"Hospital + shopping mall" sounds strange, but there is a precedent. According to the information, the domestic medical shopping mall (Medical Mall) is still in its infancy, and the foreign Medical Mall originated in the United States in the 80s of the last century. Due to the problems of weak operation, expensive medical treatment, and insufficient medical resources in some shopping centers, a number of medical shopping centers have emerged.
According to the American Emergency Care Association, as early as 2013, there were 9,400 walk-in clinics in the United States, of which more than one-third were opened in shopping malls and shopping malls.
At present, there are very few medical shopping malls in China, such as Hangzhou Tower 501 City Plaza, Beijing Health Wisdom Valley, and Gansu Zhongyou Health City.
Indoor navigation map, source Hangzhou Tower 501 City Square public account
Taking Hangzhou Building 501 as an example, the venue is divided into four major sections: health care, entertainment life, catering and food, and parent-child education, of which the 1st to 5th floors above ground are shopping areas, and the 9~22nd floors are medical centers, of which beauty and body, sports and health-related brands account for a high proportion, and there are 8 clinics, 1 rehabilitation store and 1 shared pharmacy in the medical service sector alone.
The secret to making money
As the saying goes, standing on the tuyere is a pig that can fly. Can the nursing business that stands on the tuyere achieve good results when it enters the mall?
In view of the combination of "professional medical care + shopping mall", some media pointed out that the main constraint to the development of domestic medical malls lies in the uncertainty of the operators about the profitability of the health care industry. Most of the private medical institutions in the venue are private medical institutions with high customer unit prices, and their profitability and leasing capacity are not as strong as imagined.
After research, Retail Jun found that the nursing stores in shopping malls in many places in China have closed down one after another, and the nursing industry needs to think carefully if it wants to successfully gain a foothold in the shopping mall.
Take the face wash cat as an example, focusing on facial care, mainly in shopping malls. According to data from the Meituan platform, there are currently more than 1,000 stores covered by Washcat. The founder of Wash Cat said that the next goal of Wash Cat is to reach 10,000 stores within 5 years.
In the view of retail jun, the key to the continuous rollout of Wash Cat and good revenue lies in the understanding and positioning of consumer consumption habits in shopping malls.
Source: Wash Face Cat's official Weibo
Visiting shopping malls is not a frequent demand for consumers, even if there is such a frequent demand for community shopping malls, most consumers who come to shopping malls are mainly for eating, drinking, making friends, watching movies and entertainment. How to attract more customers to the store is a question that every care brand needs to think about after entering the mall.
In this regard, the way to play the face cat is to make the model light and the customer base bigger. Different from traditional facial cleansing and skin care stores, which mainly focus on the adult female market and focus on the conversion of members, the direction of Cleancat is "single-time, affordable, and de-gendered".
The service items of Wash Cat include 6 categories, such as deep skin cleaning, deep pore cleaning, relieving eye fatigue, and deep hydration, with an average unit price of 80~120 yuan, corresponding to a service duration of 30~40 minutes. From the perspective of customer base, the proportion of male customers of Wash Cat accounts for 45%, and the cleaning program specially designed for men ranks among the top sales in Meituan stores.
At present, some of the care stores in the market are similar to the single-time, affordable and fast mode of washing cats. But at the same time, it is inevitable that lightweight product setups will put care stores in an awkward position.
First, it is not as professional as the big stores that are opened outside the mall, and they also lack an immersive experience, resulting in poor consumer stickiness; Second, the care stores in this type of model provide more simple items, with low thresholds and short service hours, which are easy to be replaced by similar stores.
Or in order to solve such a positioning problem, the retailer Jun saw on the Xiaohongshu App that there are massage foot soaking stores in shopping malls that cut into the consumption scene of "lunch break" and played the slogan of "a good place for white-collar workers to take a lunch break in the surrounding area", but whether this is a sustainable way to stick to customers remains to be verified.
At last
Seriously, it's hard to imagine what the mall will look like in the future.
It is bold to guess that if we continue to develop along the path of "one-stop solution complex for all kinds of consumer needs", after stepping into the mall, it will look like this:
01 Buy a cup of milk tea first, ride horses, watch exhibitions, and play electric on the 1st floor in the morning, and visit clothing and trendy toy stores on the 2nd ~ 3rd floor.
02 Go to the top floor for a meal at noon, and then walk into the shoulder and neck clinic opposite to consult a doctor.
03In the afternoon, I met friends for coffee, watched a movie, and found a store to do spa push back before dinner.
04Before leaving the mall at night, I suddenly remembered that the autumn had cooled down to buy some cold medicine for myself and my family, and went back to the pharmacy on the 5th floor...
At that time, for various formats, if you want to open in the shopping mall and continue to develop in the shopping mall, you need to be more "rolled". In the face of competition from off-site high-end stores, street shops, and more care stores in more shopping malls in the future, in addition to meeting the occasional needs of consumers, it is also necessary to find reasons for stores to be loved by consumers and continue to repurchase.