How Landsec leverages Acorn to elevate their consumer understanding

Solution

CACI first conducted a national representative survey to better understand consumers’ shopping habits, motivations for visiting retail centres and how they research and consume information about their shopping destinations or brand updates. These results were then appended to CACI’s geodemographic segmentation, Acorn, enriching the core Acorn groups and bringing them to life to provide a ’Landsec shopper’ lens. CACI included wider datasets such as Brnd Dimensions to understand relevant brand alignment and spending behaviours (including online and offline shopping behaviours). The resulting personas have equipped Landsec with an enhanced consumer understanding and crucial information for targeted marketing campaigns, internal strategy planning, leasing decision-making and wider brand placement. Furthermore, underpinning these personas with the Acorn structure has allowed Landsec to bridge them across all other datasets.

According to Vanessa Luen, Insights Director at Landsec, these personas “brought consumers to life” by identifying the profiles – and ultimately the needs and preferences – of individuals. This shopping-specific lens is helping the business better understand how consumers spend and engage with specific brands from a qualitative perspective.

Dan Wharton, Marketing Director at Landsec, elaborated on the impact that “humanising” data through the consumer personas has had on the wider business.

“Across our business, we had a broad interpretation of what the cold data or demographic terms were. I think this has given far more of a laser focus of who that consumer is and how we should go about attracting them to our destinations, which is fundamentally what we’re interested in and makes life a lot more humanised in terms of internal communication and in briefing agencies when it comes to our creative positioning,” he explained. “Since the personas are so robust and detailed, it really supports us in the work that we do.”

These personas have also augmented Landsec’s digital activation briefings for their creative agencies, ensuring that outputs are tailored to the right target audiences, with the right message, in the right channel, appealing to new and potential tenants alike.

Summary

This initiative has helped Landsec better understand consumers’ sentiments towards different marketing channels, ultimately guiding their CRM proposition and strategic decision-making away from investing in the development of an app.

“There was a specific piece of data on the use of apps that actually directed where we went with our CRM proposition,” Dan explained. “It’s very expensive to do apps and what we found was that it wasn’t that important to the customer to have an app through those personas. So, it has started to guide strategic decision making.”

What began as an initiative to better understand Landsec consumers has led to the development and integration of these personas into the existing CRM database and a data-driven deliverable that has been well received across the wider business and agencies alike. While their application in campaigns and integration into Landsec’s existing brand proposition are still in early days, the team is confident that the personas will bolster their strategic planning capabilities. According to Vanessa, CACI’s strategic and competitor knowledge took the development of these personas to the next level.

Appending the Acorn segmentation and different attributes along with survey results has also enabled Landsec to build out more personalised and relevant content. Linking results to Acorn profiles enriched the insight, offering a deeper understanding of consumers and how best to engage with them.. Going forward, adopting a business-wide culture with the Landsec consumer remaining at the heart of everything they do is key for Vanessa, particularly with ongoing support from CACI.

“I think CACI is a huge part of that, not just on the personas, but the data that we purchased in terms of understanding our consumer, the potential even on our development assets as well,” she shared.

For Dan, it’s building on the foundations of this work and creating a single source of truth across the business rather than multiple interpretations built on disparate datasets.

“What’s key for us is having alignment of who that consumer is, what value we can bring to them across Landsec, and where the opportunity is to drive further,” he added.