New Town Plaza (NTP) is one of the most popular shopping malls in Hong Kong. The visitor traffic to NTP is always huge, you would not be surprised by the herds of customers waiting outside restaurants for hours just to queue for a table. This substantially reduced the shopping time and induced bad customer experience. Meanwhile, the competition among shopping malls has become fierce as many brand new shopping malls were launched. In order to keep her competitiveness, NTP decided to invest in mobile as part of the Owned Strategy.

As an integral part of their Paid-Owned-Earned (POE) strategy, “Mall Without Boundary” enables seamless communication with their shoppers in the long run.

The campaign started with the core idea - “Wait Less, Shop More”, which carried a concept of “Turn waiting time into shopping time”. Instead of waiting for seats at restaurants’ reception, shoppers can book their tables in advance via mobile and continue shopping without hassle. With this first-ever mobile restaurant booking service in Hong Kong, customers could choose their favorite restaurants; get tickets with table and seat preference via the mobile app. A notification would come to the customers’ smartphones when there were 10 tables ahead.

To continually strengthen the Owned Strategy, we also introduced the “Parking Tracker” service to shoppers in Dec 2012. All driving shoppers can keep track of the parking time and location at a glance. It reminds them how much time they have spent and prevent them from paying extra because of a few minutes late.

In addition, the shoppers within the community can enjoy the hottest promotions, special e-coupons and tailor-made events exclusively in this Owned Platform. For example, “Make a Wish” campaign was designed for the Christmas Eve Countdown Event. A live poll was held and customers could make a wish with their phone.

The platform has already issued over 300,000 restaurant tickets with a total of 170,000+ downloads of the app. It proved that “Wait Less, Shop More” brought uniquely engaging mobile experience for customers.

It has created a Win-Win-Win situation:

i) Customers enjoyed 30% more shopping time on average

ii) Shops gained more sales

iii) Restaurants could reduce the cost for queue management and attracted significant number of new customers for dining

Last but not the least, it established NTP an owned platform for direct communication with shoppers, which paved the way for future promotion and loyalty marketing.