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Springboard’s People Counters Tell Landlords and Retailers All About Consumer Behavior

March 2, 2022

Many locales are relaxing COVID restrictions, and those changes are accelerating retail shopper traffic, according to Springboard, a British firm that measures footfall in retail stores, shopping centers and downtowns. To learn more about the company and what its solutions are revealing about the recovery in retail traffic, Commerce + Communities Today editor-in-chief Amanda Metcalf and contributing editor Joe Gose spoke with Springboard marketing and insights director Diane Wehrle.

How does your technology work, and what data do you collect?

It’s a little fried egg-shaped device that counts people as they pass through a zone. We typically set up several different counting points that track the volume of activity, which gives us continuous information on the customer flow and journey in stores, malls or other shopping destinations. We’ve amassed a huge amount of data in both the U.K. and U.S. and can identify trends across different assets. The technology helps us understand immediate changes in consumer behavior in response to different situations like specific events or promotional activities, but it also reveals more fundamental and structural changes, such as what happens when you introduce a new retailer into a mall because we’re tracking shopper traffic every day.

The counters can be calibrated to identify cars, too. We can count vehicles coming into a car park or the volume of vehicles along a downtown street and link it to pedestrian activity to determine whether a traffic management plan is improving shopper traffic or deterring people.

We also developed a service that converts shopping mall traffic into sales. It has helped mall owners determine which categories or retailers are performing better or worse. The owners can then use that information to relocate struggling retailers to a more appropriate place in the mall or provide a bigger store to retailers that are trading too densely. After we introduced our solution to shopping malls, we began working with retailers, but they predominantly just want the traffic data: how many people are passing the store and how many of those people are entering the store.

How did Springboard get into the footfall-counting business?

We started in 2002 and focused on downtowns in the U.K. because they were a poorly serviced sector. There were companies that were tracking shopper traffic in U.K. malls, and they had quite a foothold in that space, but no one had been able to track shoppers downtown or even attempted to. Since downtowns are a major destination both in the U.K. and in the U.S., we developed our proposition to look at shopper traffic there. We then started working with shopping malls, and we very quickly reached the conclusion that we could collect any form of data relating to the performance of retail destinations and stores. We expanded into the U.S. in 2017 in a big way, and our counters are in downtowns, malls, strip malls and outdoor shopping centers.

Shoppers have felt more comfortable in open-air centers during the pandemic, and urban shopping districts are the ultimate open-air centers. Still, your findings indicate these areas are dependent on office workers, even if there is a residential component.

Office workers are the real downtown traffic drivers, so inevitably, shopper traffic is low. And with the hybrid work model, they’re only coming into the office two or three days a week, whereas if you’re working from home, you have more freedom and flexibility to visit a shopping mall. You might go out in the evening after work. That’s something you’re less likely to do after coming home from working downtown. International tourism is also low, and it drives traffic in key downtowns like New York and Chicago.

What does your U.S. data say about trends during the pandemic and where we stand today?

We are seeing a fluctuating recovery in shopper traffic, but we’ve still got quite a gap from where we were in 2019. The biggest drops have by far been in downtowns. Traffic typically started to climb after the initial surge ended, only to be dragged down by delta and then the omicron variant as people returned to work from home. In January, shopper traffic in downtowns was 42% lower than in January 2019. That’s better than January of 2021, when the gap was 63% from two years earlier. But in December 2021, the gap had closed to 29% compared to December 2019. Shopping malls have been more resilient. Traffic is still fluctuating, but in January, malls were 20% below January 2019, which again, was better than January 2021, when mall traffic was down 35%.

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