Factors affecting the success of shopping centres in Hong Kong

Abstract

Shopping centre is very important in our daily life. It consists of retail stores and leisure facilities for public to spend their time as well as maximises their quality of lives. Many decades ago, the majority of shopper preferred to shop in street fronting outlets and the open food markets. After a well development of retail business, there was a move away from the open markets to shopping centres.

In the past two decades, the economy of Hong Kong has undergone a remarkable transformation, which continues to grow strongly recent years. The development of a shopping centre has got dynamic changes as well. The demand for an improved quality of life is increasing so that the basic shopping environment cannot satisfy shoppers. Apart from having good shopping environment in shopping centres, shoppers expect to take other advantages such as receiving exciting experience and having diversification of tenant mix. In fact, a successful shopping centre should be accommodated in a multi-purpose building where integrated with different facilities, for example shopping, entertainment, dining, and recreation. It aims to reduce the travel time of shoppers and provide what they actually need.

Four shopping centres, APM, New Town Plaza, Telford Plaza and Maritime Square, are selected in this dissertation. Seven factors including location and visibility, accessibility, size, design and layout, anchor tenant, tenant mix and promotion which affect the success of shopping centres in Hong Kong are chosen after study the literature review. Nevertheless, numerous scholars argued the relative importance of the factors, for example, Beddington (1982) and Abratt et al.(1985) emphasized that the success of a shopping centre was affected by the tenant mix which was the single most important determinant. Abghari and Hanzaee (2011) opined that the tenant mix is an influential factor of a shopping centre while other factors are less important. Consequently, two hypotheses were established in this study.

In this research, the importance of the factors for successful shopping centres was studied in details and this would be useful for owners and management operators of shopping malls. Total twelve research questions were analyzed through conducting surveys for tenants and shoppers, and they were categorized into two categories which were to find out the dominant factors affecting the success of shopping centres and to rank those factors in order to find out the most crucial factor.

After performing the thorough data analysis, it was found that “accessibility” and “tenant mix” were the dominant factors affecting the success of shopping centres where “accessibility” was the most crucial factor. Recent years, with the development and improvement of transportation network, the importance of “accessibility” factor has gradually increased. Actually, “accessibility” was the main reason to attract people to visit shopping centres, which could increase the pedestrian flow and sales volume of the malls. In addition, shoppers were not willing to spend time on travelling so that “accessibility” became more important. On the other hand, the findings of this survey showed that “tenant mix” was less important than “accessibility” due to the similar tenant mix and homogenous shopping centres in Hong Kong, and it also showed that “promotion” was the least important affecting the success of shopping centres. It was because most regional shopping centres have adopted similar promotional activities, which cannot attract shoppers to do shopping.