London West End BID is hoping to roll out its new data format according to Jace Tyrell, chief executive, New West End Company.
The organisation will formally launch its report into its joined up data strategy later this month, as it looks to combine data sources to create strategic learnings.
Tyrell told the ICSC Retail Innovation conference last week: “Working with PWC, we are bringing our data sets together. The retailers in our BID area shared their data, on who is visiting, from where, and for how long. And we are launching this fully in October, with 67 brands currently signed up, with the aim to have 100 by the end of the year, 200 by the end of next year.
“The data combines three main areas: transaction data; global travel and mobile network information, which means we can start to determine not just spend, but where and when. For example, in London’s West End 50% of expenditure is international. At the moment we have been able to aggregate over the last six months to see what drives underlying trends but the longer we can track data the more same year events and performance we can monitor.”
RPA Perspective “So what have we seen so far? Firstly, Christmas trading is dominated by domestic consumers, Saturday is still one of busiest days but Sunday is very strong. Shoppers stay on Oxford Street later than Bond Street, yet 77% of footfall is domestic,” said Tyrell. “On the latter street, American Express is used 2.5 times more than other cards and while China is important, Japan is very strong, while US visitors come in high volume, but are relatively low value in spend.”
He added: “But it’s not just about spend, for example we can see that qualitative issues such as air quality are now a very high priority and a real challenge, which gives us evidence to back our policy requests.”
The organisation has lobbied for the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street but concedes that this is now very unlikely to get local government support. However, Tyrell does believe that road use restrictions and a push for a zero emissions zone may be supported by Westminster.
He said that the impact of disturbances in other cities did have a direct knock-on effect on the performance of London.
He said: “We can also see how inter-connected the major global cities are. For example, London made double digit gains during the height of the jillet jaunes protests – we could see a direct correlation, showing that the international customer is very volatile. We are very keen to roll out our data work beyond London, providing resources and a profile of global cities.”
NWEC would like to offer the data system as a commercial package to other cities and once the data manipulation and key learnings have been taken from the London project it aims to offer it as a paid-for service for other major tourist cities.
