Member Article

intu build brand strength with consumer research community

intu, the leading owner and manager of prime regional shopping centres in the UK, has selected Manchester based agency, Join the Dots, as its research partner in an ambitious project that will continue to strengthen the intu brand.

In response to a challenging research brief, Join the Dots will be running a market research online community (MROC) using the fourth generation of their community panel platform developed last year. Communities are the ideal method for stakeholders to listen to the voice of the customer. Join the Dots have over ten years’ experience in managing online communities and their philosophy of ‘closeness’ is at the heart of this partnership.

Customer Experience Director at intu, Roger Binks commented, “Understanding our customers and giving a compelling shopping experience are central to the intu brand. By working with Join the Dots, we can ensure we provide even better shopping and leisure experiences. Through our existing Tell intu, the UK’s only national shopping centre feedback system, customers by their thousands have given us their views about their shopping experiences in our centres. Now, through Join the Dots, we can supplement that information and really get under the skin of what customers enjoy in our centres and how we can make their visits even better.”

The MROC, entitled ‘Shopper View’ and made up of over 1,200 members, will allow intu to speak directly with customers to understand their needs and wants. With half the UK population visiting an intu centre each year, their customers are extremely diverse, making this research project even more important to keep the brand on top of and ahead of change.

Project Manager for the community, Eva Petrova from Join the Dots, commented: “intu understands the strength of a single, national brand. Its values are not a million miles away from our own – world-class service, events that are different, digital connectivity and community initiatives. It is for this reason that we’re really looking forward to working with such an experiential, innovative, customer-focused and genuine business.”

The ‘Happiness Model’, developed by Join the Dots’ Consumer Trends Team, will play a key role in the projects run on the MROC. Eva Petrova commented: “Customer experience and happiness are hot topics in market research at the moment and we think it’s testament to intu’s commitment that will help them get a better understanding of their customers.

“We plan to use a wide variety of research methods on the community to really uncover what existing customers think about intu and inform the future direction of the brand. The community will run a mixture of shopping centre specific tasks as well as a myriad of lifestyle, leisure and shopping questions applicable to the majority of members.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Kate Rhodes .