“The rapid growth in online retailing is forcing shopping malls to deliver a wider range of retail and non-retail outlets, whilst becoming more convenient to navigate around, and to deliver a more appealing shopping experience.
Continued rapid urbanisation, especially in lower tier cities, is leading to the development of more mixed-use malls that integrate shopping with entertainment, leisure, working and living space. They have to adapt alongside the “smart city” concept and use Big Data predictive analysis to become more adaptive and responsive to rapidly changing consumer needs.
Malls must also provide an increasingly wide variety of products and services, including the familiar outlets people expect, and new and niche products, brands and services to create the excitement of discovery.
Malls must also broaden their appeal to become more inclusive, and so attract those who tend to avoid malls, or only use them when they have to. In this, they must integrate more into the communities they aim to serve, especially in the rapidly urbanising lower tier cities.”
Definition
For the purposes of this report, Mintel has used the following definitions:
Shopping malls are defined as one or more buildings forming a complex of stores, foodservice locations, and other businesses (such as cinemas, salons/day spas, fitness centres) with connecting walkways enabling visitors to walk from outlet to outlet. This includes both indoor and outdoor shopping malls and includes those with and without parking areas.
This report focuses on traditional shopping malls only. Outlet malls (malls where a majority of retailers are outlet or discount stores) and strip malls (outdoor areas where several retail outlets exist side by side, often adjacent to one another, generally with a parking lot) may be mentioned, but are excluded from Mintel’s definition of shopping malls.
Note: Shopping malls are sometimes referred to as shopping centres.
Methodology
For the purpose of this report, Mintel commissioned a quantitative research survey carried out online to explore consumption and attitudes of consumers, aged between 20 and 49, towards shopping in shopping malls.
Fieldwork was conducted in January 2015, in four tier-1 cities, six tier-2 and tier-3 cities. The tier-1 cities include Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu. The tier-2 and tier-3 cities included Chengdu, Harbin, Liaocheng, Changzhou, Jiaxing, Fuzhou and Chongqing.
This is a marketing intelligence report published by Mintel. The consumer research exclusively commissioned for this report was conducted by a Chinese licensed market survey agent (see Research Methodology China for more information).
Abbreviations
| CCFA | China Chain Store and Franchise Association |
| GDP | Gross Domestic Product |
| GFA | Gross Floor Area - a measure of actual shopping mall space, including service areas, customer access and rented retail/services unit space. |
| MOFCOM | Ministry of Commerce |
| NBS | National Bureau of Statistics |
| NFC | Near field communication transaction technology |
| PPP | Purchasing power parity |
| O2O | Online-to-offline retail sales |
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