Marketing of the shopping mall involves a multi-faceted program of cooperation with target groups of visitors, promotion of tenant brands and creating the attractiveness of the shopping mall as a social space where you can spend your leisure time, realize your own social life and make purchases.
Olena Pohodina, Marketing Director of Arricano, talks about the importance of surprises and gifts for guests of shopping malls and brands in an exclusive column for Malls Club.

The main competitive advantage of the shopping mall is several factors at once – the atmosphere, a harmonious tenant-mix that meets the needs of target segments, as well as brand communications within the shopping mall. All together, this enhances positive emotions.

Secret boxes as a surprise effect
Specially for the Spring Fest, Prospekt shopping mall hosted a prize draw for secret boxes - 200 gift boxes containing certificates from brands. On the one hand, it was a classic promotion with receipts registration. However, the special features and growth of hype was the effect of surprise and the unknown. After all, the participants, along with the desire to receive a gift, also wanted to find out what was inside. Therefore, the brands that provided certificates for secret boxes received a positive reaction, respect and gratitude from the guests of the shopping mall with double effect.
In our team, we have repeatedly seen that the larger the number of prizes is, the more positively charged the guests of the shopping mall are. One significant big prize or even several prizes, of course, cause more excitement to take part in the promotion. However, 200 lucky winners with secret prizes are better than several thousand desperate participants, whose questionnaires remained lying in the drawing machine.

Tenant-mix for communication and analysis
The shopping mall as an object in its primary task unites dozens of brands in different categories and formats. Therefore, it is quite logical that in communications, the shopping mall offers ready-made shopping scenarios that are based on basic analytics - a mix of which stores do visitors choose in one visit to the mall? The goal of secret boxes with certificates and bonuses from brands is to expand the map of visits, motivate guests to visit partner stores, get a positive shopping experience and record positive emotions not only in the gallery of the shopping mall, but also on the store's territory.
After all, at the time of purchase, at the checkout with a certificate in your hands, the main consumer insight - to get more than expected -  takes place. This is the strength of the certificate and its added value.

Relevance of social distance
We understand that the audience of the shopping mall misses large-scale events and concerts. However, social distance and respiratory etiquette have not yet been canceled. Therefore, by adhering to these internationally required requirements, we generate new formats of performances in the shopping mall.
This is not easy, because at the same time you need to implement mutually exclusive tasks – privacy and scale, involvement and contemplation, distance and interactiveness.  
Online streaming is a good tool for tracking events on your gadget. At the same time, the struggle of the campaign participants for a big prize provokes crowds around the main stage or the host. To regulate the distance of 1.5 m at performances, we invite moderators of social distance, who politely and diplomatically remind participants about the rules of stay in the shopping mall. In addition, we avoid peak situations using other organizational solutions. The fact that we had 200 prizes raffled off throughout the evening with breaks also helped avoid the crowds. As a result, everyone took part, and they took turns coming up for prizes.

Source: mallsclub.com