According to Jagran Solutions’ web ad on malls and shopping complexes, malls today offer an aggregate of “90 million square feet of air-conditioned space for experiential marketing”. It reports that already there are 130 malls in the top 23 cities, and 220 more mall projects are in the pipeline countrywide. Marketers are alive to the growing popularity of malls as the preferred shopping environment, especially in the big cities, and the merchandising and promotional opportunities thrown up by them.

This brings us to the relevance of integrated media to add both breadth and saturated coverage to retail promotions in malls. Localized print, outdoor and in-store and other BTL communications automatically come to mind as the traditional media of choice. In the 21st century, add the Internet to catch the younger shoppers. But even more than the ’Net, mall promotions open up a huge potential for mobiles as the ideal vehicle.

The mobile medium is easily accessible to buyer and seller alike. Promos on it are easily implementable by retail marketers and outlets. For shoppers, such communication could have enormous practical value, most particularly for those who are already visitors and shoppers at the venue of a promo -- maybe folks who live within easy distances. In fact, for generation next, a mobile message (in text or voice or imagery) will have the same immediacy as the handwritten SALE and discount offers in more traditional stores and supermarkets.

Going mobile makes excellent sense for top-city malls. Why not for the lesser cities? First, it’s in the numbers. While mobile telephony is growing in leaps and bounds on the whole, there are still large tracts of the country – let’s take just the heartland states of UP, MP and Bihar for example – still untapped for basic mobile telephony. These include urban markets where most mobile service providers are still focused on converting non-users to cellphones, and to increase usage through tariff reductions and other such attractions. There may be localized exceptions to this status, but in general, we will have to wait a couple of years for mobile services in these other cities to move beyond selling connections to VAS.

Secondly, it’s because of users’ own graduated acceptance of mobile use. Experience says that most mobile users begin with basic telephony; gather interest in ringtones and wallpapers; advance to music downloads; then on to phones that enable access to heavier files through broadband, and finally – to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc. Which means that the retailers already present in malls in metros and big cities, with very high mobile penetration, are best positioned to tap shoppers who would support such promotions in their own interest.

(The author is AVP & Branch Head, Percept/H, Lucknow)