Marketing vs reality: When mall owners get it wrong

The quality of a shopping mall gets expressed through a broad menu of attributes: tenant mix, mall design, navigability, ease of access and egress, parking spaces, safety, how clean the toilets are, and so on. Not every mall can get everything exactly right, for a variety of reasons, so it’s a process of constant striving and improvement. Often the malls that are doing well get the lion’s share of investment from their owners while the weaker projects are neglected. This leads to a growing schism in performance between the good malls and the bad ones.

Platinum Group, owner of Platinum Fashion Mall in downtown Bangkok, has presented us with a starker contrast than usual. And it highlights the need for mall owners to keep their marketing collateral up to date and be forthcoming about the status of a project, or accept that you are going to have some very annoyed customers.

The gem

First the good news in this Jekyll and Hyde story: Platinum Fashion Mall is a rabbit warren of a mall boasting more than 2,000 vendors on six levels selling at wholesale prices to both retailers and end-consumers. It is is back near its brilliant best — close to fully occupied (up from 60 per cent at the end of 2021) and brimming with foot traffic. It is also sporting a new food centre on the 6th floor that can hold 1,500 customers.

The dud

Platinum’s second vertical mall in the downtown area, The Market Bangkok, is part of a mixed-use project located just a few hundred metres away in a retail-, hotel- and office-rich environment that includes a Big C Supercenter and Central World, the third-largest mall in Thailand. Like Platinum Fashion Mall, Central World is an icon on the Ratchadamri strip and The Market Bangkok is almost directly opposite. 

Rarely has a mall fouled up such a superb location. 

The project, in its ideal state, would have a ground-level food court and four levels of retail sitting beneath an office tower called Pier 111. The structural work on the building was completed well over a year ago and CBRE was appointed to manage the leasing. It still looks very dark and quiet up there though, but when Inside Retail reached out to CBRE’s head of property management in Bangkok for a status update, they informed us that CBRE was no longer agent for the property. 

So much for the offices, what about the retail?

Most people would enter the retail part — The Market Bangkok — from the Bangkok Skyline, an elevated walkway on the mezzanine (first floor) level and the first thing they would see is a Starbucks. That is as good as it gets. The interior of the mall is well-lit, but the building shell has the feel of a warehouse rather than a traditional retail mall. Perhaps this is the intent, to imbue it with a ‘market’ ambience, but it just doesn’t work because the merchandising doesn’t compensate for the ‘no frills’ design. (This is not Costco.) 

Front and centre is an information desk that has no sign of recent human habitation. Just two forlorn looking brochures flop hopefully forward in their plastic casement, as though hoping to be dropped on the floor and swept out of the building.

On the left side is a long area — perhaps 25 metres long by 5 metres deep — that has been walled off with grey cloth sheets, concealing a vacant space of bare concrete. Venturing further, there are some attractive- and not so attractive-looking small shops featuring obscure clothing and accessories brands, interspersed with some more vacant space. 

This was nothing like what one would come to expect from the website, whose marketing spiel starts cheerily: “Meet the ultimate market, food court, fashion, and dream destinations on a 20-rai plot of land in the Ratchaprasong area, with the concept of being a hip market. The new dream of Bangkok or Bangkok New Dream. Let’s see what someone’s dream will be like, with the idea of creating a shopping center concept in the new era, Thailand 4.0”.

Huh?

Here is the reality. The up-escalator leads you to nothing but a wall with a small landing area in front of it. The adjacent escalator tantalises you with the possibility of going even further up, but peering up there it didn’t look like the layout was any different on the next level either: a landing area, a wall, possibly another up-escalator. Worse, the normal passageways alongside the escalators are blocked off. There is simply nowhere to go. It wasn’t obvious there was any way down, which is about the time that a mildly claustrophobic visitor might start to panic. 

It turned out that there was a way down from there…run down the up-escalator. Not the best way to traverse floors in a vertical mall.

A tip for mall owners: keep your marketing up to date

Most visitors would have pretty fixed ideas about what they want from a shopping centre and having the pants scared off them isn’t one. For that, they go on the rollercoaster at the amusement park, or watch re-runs of The Shining. There are times when malls are in transition, things are being taken down and put up, outstanding leases are being run down, financing is in abeyance, and so on. Fair enough. But at least put the marketing fluff to one side and put out good information, or better yet remove it altogether until the property is running properly. 

Let’s finish on a positive note though. Along with Platinum Fashion Mall and The Market Bangkok, Platinum Group also owns two hotels, The Novotel Bangkok Platinum Pratunam and Holiday Inn Resort Samui. For the first six months of 2023, the company had net income after taxes of 41.8 million Thai baht (approximately US$1.2 million.). It has run at a loss for a few years so the six-month profit, albeit slender, is a positive sign. 

As for The Market Bangkok, the location is to die for, just don’t let someone die in there first.

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