Footfall has traditionally been seen as a measure of the health of the high street. On this basis, it looks like town and city centres across the UK are in trouble, with poor footfall levels compared to the pre-pandemic situation. Beauclair’s data, however, shows that there has actually been a recovery in offline retail spending levels in town and city centres to pre-pandemic levels, despite the drop in footfall.
Beauclair’s recent analysis of footfall and spend data for GO! Southampton Business Improvement District may provide an answer to this puzzle. We believe that our analysis was pioneering in bringing together detailed spending data on different zones within Southampton city centre and footfall data (supplied by Proximity Futures) for similar zones.
Beauclair found that while fewer people are returning to high streets, those who have returned are staying longer in the city centre, with dwell time increasing in three out of four retail zones. For example, in the central zone, which predominantly attracts local customers, higher dwell time is related to higher Health & Beauty sales. Meanwhile in the south zone, higher dwell time is correlated with higher Entertainment sales. Both north and south zones have experienced large increases in Food & Drink sales. This suggests that offline spending is being increasingly focused on “in-person” or experiential spending such as Health & Beauty, Food & Drink and Entertainment which are re-engaging people, and enabling town and city centres to compete with online retail offerings.
For GO! Southampton, local insights have helped shape how it tackles this shift in the way customers interact with the high street. Flo Bevis, Marketing Manager at GO! Southampton says that “bringing together our datasets, including spend and footfall, has provided us with some rich insights and recommendations which we will use to steer our marketing strategies and will help the BID to understand how to best support our businesses and drive the visitor economy. We will be looking at how we can work closely with the shopping centres to encourage movement around the city as well as the overall visitor experience.”
Luke Preston, Data Analyst at Proximity Futures, highlights the benefits of joining together the two sources of data: “Looking at financial data and footfall together can help us to understand on a deeper level the reasons behind changes when footfall has declined. Using only one single data source can restrict the potential insights that are presented by the footfall data on its own. Therefore, data linkage is vital in validating the findings of one source to another, allowing stronger confidence and more comprehensive insights.”
Looking to the future of high streets, Business Improvement Districts and retail area managers need to think about the variety of outlets in their retail areas and whether these maximise customer dwell time and enhance the demand for in-person and leisure experiences and socialising.
