There is no recipe for being innovative; instead it is driven by “listening” your audience, customers, market trends. Understanding what they require, combined with an established motivation to fulfill these needs puts in motion the creative thinking required to innovate your products or services.
We run a real estate business in multiple market segments. Mainly our retail division, Baneasa Mall, is the one that has adopted the business model of innovation. You can find this starting with values and drilled down to processes. Our perspective of this business is not one about walls, bricks and windows; it is one of a civic center that brings millions of people in one place to shop, eat, entertain and most importantly to interact. Once this perspective is established, then everything unfolds in time. Obviously, there is a cultural change that needs to be implemented and this takes a lot of effort and time.
It is for sure a demand for innovation in our retail business in order to obtain a strategic advantage. While location and access to a mall is of prime importance, loyalty is equally important for sustainability. The three most important steps that we have taken in this directions are a) the operation of our own entertainment business within the mall, b) the shift of our marketing focus on online channels and c) the implementation of state of the art technology to monitor our operations and metrics.
We can clearly claim that we are innovative in our retail business (Baneasa Mall). We have taken numerous innovative steps in online marketing channels, for example, but we think that one of the best strategic decision we took was to build and operate our own entertainment division within the same organization that manages the mall. We run our own cinema and soon we will run two more units, a leisure one and an exhibition center. We are probably the only ones in the European market to do so. Furthermore, within the cinema unit we run what we call alternative content; we project live cultural events such as Enescu festival, live concerts, we produce theatrical plays, stand up comedies and many more which is a unique proposition to the market. The result of our strategy is twofold; firstly it has created a very strong loyalty from our visitors and secondly managing a B2C function (in addition to the standard B2B leasing model) drove our marketing focus on the visitors’ needs rather than just the tenants’ needs. By extension our whole organization is aligned to constantly watching trends and customer needs, a culture that will promote further innovation.
