🛒 Exploring shopping malls

Diving deep into the design of shopping malls and how it resonates with the design thinking process.

Even though E-commerce has grown exponentially in recent years and Covid hit in 2019, curbs forced brick-and-mortar stores to close. But there are mind-blowing statistics to prove that people prefer brick-and-mortar stores rather than online shopping and the re-opening of shopping malls throws immense profits on the retail stores. On that note, let's see how malls are designed to trick you.

Two kinds of people

Two kinds of people go to a mall. People who take an escalator in a mall and people who take an elevator. The mall cherishes and welcomes people who only take an escalator.

Why? The people who take an elevator are not valuable to the mall because they come very targeted. What do I mean they are very targeted? They come to the mall to buy either a targeted product and they knew which floor the shop is in and they go straight and take an elevator, buy the product and leave, or probably they are the ones who enter the mall to use the food court on the last floor or the loo in the third floor and they go back to the parking. But the ones that take the escalator are the ones that walk the floor. The ones that walk the floor in a mall are gonna add value to the mall. The ones that walk the floor are the ones that are gonna give you business. Because they randomly loiter in the mall and go through each floor, each shop and buy products that they don’t even really need.

That’s why the store section in the CRED app is so beautifully designed that you can’t find a navigation tool (search bar to search for products) in the store section. Harish Sivaramakrishnan, the head of Design at CRED in one of his interviews with Tanmay Bhat states that CRED is not built for one to go to one particular place in the easiest fashion. He adds further that he has designed CRED in such a way that people wanted to explore the CRED store section and not come in a targeted fashion like the people who use the elevator in the malls.

This is where big E-commerce platforms like Flipkart and Amazon struggle because they don't allow customers to explore and discover products. They restrict them by placing a navigation search bar at the top and allowing them to buy a targeted product.

And surprisingly, they have a term for this - the Gruen Effect, which is a psychological phenomenon where a store's or shopping mall's design overwhelms a person so they are more easily manipulated to buy things.

The IKEA design

Have you ever been to an IKEA?

The moment you step into IKEA, it starts to feel like a maze path of different rooms. This was very intentionally designed and at the same time, this path is a fixed path route which means all customers have to go through this fixed path that guides you through the store in only one direction. It is very much set up in a way to spend at least one day along with your partner, dreaming about bedrooms, and dining tables.

Well, it might seem tiring and quite overwhelming, that's why IKEA's maze path is designed in such a way that it keeps that customer curious about what comes next. They also have a food court with their delicious authentic Swedish meatballs after the billing section so that people can grab some food after their tiring shopping experience.

Food Courts

Another common pattern that you find in all malls is the positioning of the Food court. If someone is gonna ask you where is the food court, you subconsciously reply that it is on the third floor or the last floor of the mall. Why is that? Why food courts are on the last floor of the mall?

Food is something essential and you are not gonna avoid eating after shopping for hours because shopping would make you very tired. And after eating, you feel content and satisfied and you might leave the mall without exploring the other shops. To gain traction, food courts and restaurants are always superpositioned on the top floor so that you can roam, explore, buy all unnecessary stuff, get tired, and finally, reach the top floor and enter the food court with a lot of hunger to get fat 😛

Apple Showrooms at malls

Shopping malls let Apple showrooms pay less for retail space than other stores. The typical tenant pays roughly 15% of its sales per square foot, while Apple pays roughly 2%. Mall owners extend a special offer to Apple because their stores increase foot traffic by roughly 10% for all the other stores in the mall. Apple stores also change the composition of a mall by promoting upscale stores and causing midscale and discount ones to leave.

All these highlight how much design thinking has gone into the construction and positioning of each retail store and food court in the mall.

Grocery Stores

This is even applied to grocery stores and supermarkets.

For instance -

• Chocolates and biscuits are kept in the lower stack to attract kids.

• Perfumes, soaps, and shampoos at the entrance stimulate a good fragrance.

• No windows, no clocks.

• All cooking essentials - oil, stapes, rice, wheat at the end of the store.