01704544999
01704544999
1. Target Audience Alignment: Garden centres attract homeowners, families, and individuals interested in outdoor living and landscaping. These customers will likely value reliable, spacious, and practical vehicles, making them an ideal audience for showcasing cars like SUVs, trucks, or eco-friendly vehicles.
2. Relaxed, Browsing Atmosphere: People visit garden centres for leisure, taking their time to explore. This creates a relaxed environment where potential customers are more likely to notice and appreciate product placements, without the pressure of a high-stakes sales setting.
3. Synergy with Outdoor Lifestyle: Cars can emphasise their practicality for outdoor activities (e.g., loading plants, transporting gardening equipment, towing trailers). Seeing a vehicle in a setting that highlights its utility or aesthetic appeal enhances its relevance.
4. Appeal to Eco-Conscious Shoppers: Many garden centre visitors are environmentally conscious. Featuring hybrid or electric vehicles in this environment aligns with the sustainable mindset of these customers, creating a natural connection between their interests and your product.
5. High Foot Traffic and Dwell Time: Garden centres often have consistent, high foot traffic, especially during peak seasons, with visitors spending significant time on-site. This provides prolonged exposure to car displays or advertisements, increasing the likelihood of brand recall.
6. Spacious Outdoor Display Opportunities: Garden centres provide ample space for setting up interactive or visually striking displays, allowing for experiential marketing such as test drives or vehicle demonstrations. This showcases the car’s functionality in a relevant, open-air environment.
7. Non-Competitive, Low-Pressure Setting: Garden centres, unlike car showrooms, are not high-pressure sales environments. This allows customers to explore a vehicle in a more casual setting, which may make them feel more comfortable and open to learning about or considering a vehicle purchase.
8. All-Inclusive Environment: Garden centres are popular destinations for both couples and family groups, making them ideal spaces to engage with a wide range of decision-makers. This unique setting fosters an inclusive experience where all parties involved can participate in the decision-making process together, whether it’s selecting plants, outdoor furniture, or purchasing a new car.
What should I do next?
Access Point provides high-traffic locations nationwide for product placement at venues such as Blue Diamond, Hillier, Dobbies, and British Garden Centres. For more information on ANY garden centre product placement, give us a call at 01704 544999, send an email to hello@apuk.net, or visit our garden centre information page.
1. Diverse Audience: Shopping centres and retail parks attract a broad and diverse audience, enabling dealerships to showcase their products to people from various demographics. This diversity increases the chances of reaching a wide range of potential customers.
2. High Footfall: Shopping centres and retail parks typically experience high foot traffic, ensuring the vehicles receive significant exposure. The constant flow of people creates more opportunities for engagement and increases the likelihood of potential customers noticing and exploring the showcased vehicles.
3. Extended Exposure Time: Visitors to shopping centres and retail parks often spend extended periods browsing and making purchases. This extended exposure time allows car dealerships to capture consumers’ attention, giving them ample opportunity to showcase the features and benefits of their vehicles.
4. Impulse Purchases: Shopping centres and retail parks encourage impulse purchases. Placing cars strategically can tap into this behaviour, enticing potential customers to consider a new vehicle purchase or arrange a trip to your showroom in their plans.
5. Targeted Marketing: Many shopping centres and retail parks cater to specific demographics or interests. Car dealerships can strategically choose locations that align with their target market, allowing for more focused and effective product placement. For example, a dealership showcasing a family vehicle might choose a shopping centre with family-based entertainment like soft play or a cinema.
6. Brand Association: A positive and enjoyable shopping experience can enhance the overall perception of a car brand. Placing vehicles in a vibrant and dynamic setting like a shopping centre or retail park creates a positive association, reinforcing the idea that owning the showcased cars can enhance the consumer’s lifestyle.
7. Increased Brand Recall: Repeated exposure to a dealership’s products in a shopping environment contributes to increased brand recall. When consumers think about purchasing a car, they are more likely to remember and consider a brand they encountered in the shopping centre or retail park.
What should I do next?
If, like many other car dealerships, you wish to enhance your business visibility with product placement at a high-end location. Access Point has a selection of fantastic venues available to book nationwide.
For more information, call 01704 544999, email hello@apuk.net or visit our product placement page.
A few weeks back Retail Week, as part of its ‘Retail Reimagined’ series, asked what the ‘perfect’ high street of the future looks like.
In the comprehensive article, including interviews with the country’s retail experts and the brains behind some of the most successful town centre turnarounds, we recognised a lot of the thoughts and themes that dominate the conversations we’re having internally and with our customers right now.
It’s hugely positive that the academics, the property experts, the town planners and the futurists who are influencing how our town and city centres are being developed are on the same page as the traders and landlords who are operating in those environments day-to-day.
To stand a chance of reversing the decline we’ve seen in most retail destinations, we need to agree on how to improve.
Dan Anderson, director at placemaking and destination development consultancy Fourth Street, told Retail Week: “A high street should be a reflection of the community it’s in. The clone town problem is the high street problem – they’re one and the same thing.”
After more than 20 years working with traders, landlords and managers of every kind of location, we know that what suits one venue may not have the same impact on visitors to a different location. Now more than ever, a location’s uniqueness should influence the retail and leisure offering there.
Retail Week also highlighted the shift away from a focus on static or fixed retail in favour of a more flexible approach. The venues we work with are rethinking and redesigning layouts to create more flexible space with many creating dedicated pop-up space.
This kind of creative thinking works for the trader – who can scale up and down, test the feasibility of a site for a short period before committing – and crucially for the shopper too. An everchanging roster of traders keeps things fresh, new and seasonal.
While many centres rework their existing space to accommodate changing shopping habits, it’s those locations subject to major regeneration and investment that have the best opportunity to benefit. Drawing on how consumer habits have changed in the last decade or more allows planners to create sites from scratch that are truly fit for purpose.
Late last year, Bradford Council announced it had appointed Cushman & Wakefield to help draw up plans for a sustainable new community neighbourhood in the city centre, including the site of the Oastler indoor market and shopping centre. At the time, Bradford Councillor and executive member for regeneration, planning and transport, Alex Ross-Shaw, said its plans would “take Bradford’s city centre to the next level with sustainable and healthy living combined with high quality public space that will help shape Bradford for future generations.”
Bradford’s plans look impressive. Considering how different kinds of retail – high street, centres, markets; permanent and temporary – can work together alongside residential and commercial elements from the outset means the result is going to resonate with different kinds of visitor, during the day and evening. The term ‘mixed-use’ has taken on a whole new level of importance.
In 2010, Altrincham in Greater Manchester was one of England’s emptiest high streets. The opening of the Trafford Centre, seven miles away, had taken its toll and 30% of its shops stood empty. Eight years later it was named Best High Street 2018 in the Great British High Street Awards. As Retail Week’s piece highlighted, their focus on mixed-use regeneration and the involvement of the local community have been key to its transformation.
Altrincham’s Neighbourhood Plan Forum, which comprises local businesses and community groups, has focused on turning the space above retail units into residential to make the ground floor commercial space more affordable for traders.
Its regenerated market hall now draws crowds from all corners of Greater Manchester and further afield and community-led events, like street food festivals, have proved hugely popular too.
The fact is, there isn’t one perfect high street. What’s perfect for one town, is different to the next. What’s more, the perfect high street this month will change next month. The weather, the political backdrop, how much people have in their pockets to spend – the factors influencing the success of our town and city centres are many. And the best way to cope with that everchanging landscape, built-in flexibility and a finger constantly on the pulse.
