McArthurGlen Designer Outlets

Who is McArthurGlen?

McArthurGlen is Europe’s leading designer outlet operator, with 24 centers in 8 countries across Europe and Canada. Offering an array of luxury, designer and premium brands, each center is located close to a major city. Sensormatic’s Retail Consulting Practice has been working with McArthurGlen since 2019.

McArthurGlen counts traffic at the perimeter of its centers as well as at every individual retail unit. This gives McArthurGlen a full, holistic view of center footfall.

McArthurGlen wanted to benchmark its performance against a unique set of peers. As an operator of outlet destinations rather than “regular” shopping centers, McArthurGlen did not want to compare itself to the entire retail market. Instead, McArthurGlen wanted to focus specifically on sites that were based within a 90 minute drivetime from its centers. That way, the benchmarking would be more focused and contextualized.

Sensormatic already offers benchmarking through its Market Intelligence platform. With Sensormatic having access to the industry’s largest retail data lake, subscribers can access over 800 indices in over 30 countries and more than 20 categories, with more being added all the time. Market Intelligence offers flexible trend analysis down to daily level granularity, with subscribers able to utilize custom compare periods. Despite this, Market Intelligence didn’t quite meet McArthurGlen’s needs, due to their focus being so specific.

Instead, McArthurGlen signed up to Sensormatic’s Retail Expert Program, a strategic analytics partnership designed to initiate better data driven decision making. This partnership can take the form of a myriad of different projects, including Shopper Journey, bespoke benchmarking, predictive analytics, labor effectiveness, and more. The engagement with McArthurGlen focused on bespoke benchmarking, with ad hoc analysis to fit their needs when required.

Working alongside the Advanced Analytics team, the Retail Consulting Practice created and maintained 11 different national-level indices for McArthurGlen. These indices only measured sites which were within a 90-minute drive from a McArthurGlen outlet. As with our Market Intelligence indices, custom indices are also validated to ensure that they are robust. This means an index must be representative of its geography, not overrepresented by a single competitor, and contain enough sites to make the index viable.

The Advanced Analytics team then created three custom reports to deliver the data to McArthurGlen on an ongoing basis. The first was a PDF report with visual representations of the data for each index, which is sent to a wider distribution list including the board and site managers. The second is an Excel file for use by McArthurGlen’s analytical team. Both of these files are sent on a weekly basis, and contain the year-on-year and week-on-week percentage change for the previous week. Finally, an additional Excel file is sent on a monthly basis.

Signing up to the Retail Expert Program allowed McArthurGlen to do a deep dive on its business challenges. As well as benchmarking its performance against its true competitors, it was also able to contextualize its footfall performance by country. This became especially valuable during the COVID-19 pandemic, with McArthurGlen being able to use the indices to measure its recovery against the market. Additionally, it gave McArthurGlen the opportunity to request additional analytical support when required. We have created market context and trend reports, undertaken research into national sales trends and statistics, as well as doing a deep dive into the bespoke indices to look at specific dates (such as Black Friday).

What are the benefits of the Retail Expert Program?

The Retail Expert Program benefits retailers in a myriad of ways:

• Better utilization of Sensormatic programs.
• Focused efforts, from the inside.
• Expertise and experience of wider team.
• Access to Market Intelligence database.
• More agile approach to projects, faster ROI.
• Less expensive and complex than internal hire.

What do our customers get from the Retail Expert Program?

• A committed part time consultant assigned to the client’s account.
• On site visits with the client.
• Standard and custom projects and analysis determined in partnership with client leadership, managed by Retail Consultant.

What types of projects does the Retail Expert Program offer?

• Shopper journey – using interior analytics to identify shoppers and analyze their movement in the store or center.
• Bespoke benchmarking – analyze individual store or center traffic performance against custom, anonymized competitor sets. Clients do not need to be existing Sensormatic traffic customers.
• Predictive analytics – 50B footstep repository leveraged by data scientists to forecast individual store traffic.
• Labor effectiveness assessment – traffic forecasts and brand service expectations - for profitable site wide labor allocation.
• Promotion effectiveness – measure marketing ROI comparing site traffic against custom, anonymized competitor sets.
• Segmentation analytics – use traffic data combined with demographics to group stores with their true peers.

Please click here to download a PDF version of the McArthurGlen Case Study.

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Sensormatic Solutions is the leading global retail solutions portfolio of Johnson Controls powering operational excellence at scale and enabling smart and connected shopper engagement. Our intelligent digital operating platform – Sensormatic IQ – combines the full Sensormatic Solutions portfolio, including third-party data to deliver unmatched insights into shopper experience, inventory intelligence, loss prevention and operational effectiveness with advanced technologies, like AI and Machine Learning. This enables retailers to act on prescriptive and predictive data-driven outcomes to confidently move into the future. Please visit Sensormatic Solutions or follow us on LinkedIn, X, and our YouTube channel.