“Just passing through - or a buyer?” - The pedestrian footfall rate with ever-decreasing significance for pedestrianised zones
Until now, most retail companies have been making decisions to expand in city centre locations based on a robust two-step model: First, they carry out a rough assessment of the cities based on overall attractiveness with the help of the usual municipal turnover, purchasing power and also centrality figures.
The second step is then the mapping of the supposed top locations on the basis of pedestrian footfall, which is still regarded as a central indicator for the evaluation of micro-locations within the respective city.
In fact, there is a correlation between the level of shop rents and pedestrian footfall, which can be easily perceived in the top locations in Munich (Kaufinger Straße), Cologne (Schildergasse) or Frankfurt (Zeil), which traditionally have the highest shop rents and highest footfall nationwide.
In the meantime, however, doubts are growing about this procedure for evaluating locations, because it is precisely in these prime locations that long-term vacancies are becoming noticeable for the first time. Many other pedestrian zones are no different.
The quality of the measurement of pedestrian flows with regard to accuracy and comparability of city figures has indeed increased considerably.
In particular, the start-up hystreet.com of Aachener Grundvermögen was able to create the basis for the anonymous and permanent measurement of pedestrian footfall by installing electronic laser scanners at 162 locations in 80 cities to date.
This enables reliable analyses of the extent to which, for example, the weather, the time of day or certain days of the week have an influence on the number of people passing by the shop windows. But what do such frequency comparisons or rankings actually tell us? Does every passing pedestrian have the same potential willingness to buy within them?
In the stationary retail trade of pedestrian zones, the realisation is now growing that it is not only pedestrian footfall that is decisive, rather, the qualitative composition of the visitor flows is at least as important.
If the peak values in comparably large cities such as Dortmund and Dresden were similarly high on good Saturdays pre-coronavirus, with around 7,500 passing pedestrians per hour respectively, then the sales expectations to be derived from this for the respective sectors are far from comparable, because the motives for buying on Westenhellweg could be completely different from those in Prager Straße.
Which type of customer actually still visits inner-city pedestrian zones at all because they are still attractive to them?
Who still shops in the pedestrian zones, and on which days of the week? The desire to get to know potential walk-in customers better leads to a dual dilemma: firstly, almost all methods of carrying out refined electronic customer segmentation in public places, such as facial recognition systems for determining or estimating age, gender and origin, are not to be expected under data protection law, at least in the foreseeable future.
And secondly, in the light of the current discussions regarding identity, it obviously does not seem advisable to further develop the previous methods of classic customer segmentation according to lifestyles and value orientations with, for example, eight consumer styles set out by GfK-Roper (dreamers, homebodies, settled, adventurers, rational-realists, open-minded, demanding, organics) or even with ten different styles as set out by Sinus (cf. figure).
In general, we can say that the shopping behaviour of the local population has been changing for some time now with the steady increase in women's employment.
In the past, women were able to do a lot of shopping for the whole family in the morning due to the distribution of roles, but now the available shopping time is reduced to a few hours in the late afternoon or often only at the weekend.
Adolescents also have less and less time for coffee, crêpes and cakes due to condensed school and education concepts (keyword: G8 grammar school) and are no longer present in the city centre in the afternoons.
Anyone who strolls through the pedestrian zones during the day from Monday to Thursday and takes a look around will quickly notice that the majority of people there are pensioners and people with an immigrant background.
However, this finding does not really lead anywhere because these two target groups precisely are particularly heterogeneous in themselves. On the one hand, the customer typology of the 60-plus generation could represent above-average purchasing power, because they like to indulge and tend to fall back on high-quality products, especially when it comes to purchases for the grandchildren.
On the other hand, the same 60-plus generation could also be classified in some places as a socially vulnerable fringe group that can afford just one hot drink throughout the morning, which they then sit over for hours, occupying a table in the bakery café.
It is even more difficult to assess the buying behaviour of consumers from foreign cultures. With an increasing number of passing pedestrians with an immigrant background, it is obvious that, for example, a doctor's family from Syria seeking protection does not necessarily fit into one of these typical customer segments and also has completely different consumer needs to young Africans travelling alone who are seeking their fortune in this country as economic migrants.
That there are hardly any methodological approaches to date to add to new consumer styles accordingly and to differentiate them with regard to their relevance to the retail sector is perhaps due to the fact that this approach could now be disapproved of as a blanket creation of stereotypes for stigmatisation and thus, in the worst case, cause a shitstorm of indignation.
As a consequence, at the latest since the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis, demands for the revitalisation of German city centres have dominated all discussions in the chamber of commerce districts and retail associations, but the research into the causes of current developments is mostly unanimously limited to comprehensive accusations directed at internet trade. The conspicuous change in the target groups in the inner cities, on the other hand, is still fundamentally being ignored.
On the one hand, the growing proportion of foreigners in Germany's pedestrian zones often leads to new shop concepts multiplying there just as quickly, such as barber shops, bubble tea shops, shisha bars, doughnut shops, etc., which then often leads to the relocation of existing shops in the neighbourhood.
For example, in the former ‘shopping capital’ of the Ruhr area, Essen, Rüttenscheider Strasse, which is a suburban location in the south of the city, is now more in demand for some retail concepts than Kettwiger Strasse or Limbecker Strasse in the city centre.
On the other hand, foreign shopping guests are vital for the survival of the rather high-priced retail trade and it is hard to imagine ‘luxury shopping streets’ such as Munich's Maximilianstrasse without them.
Incidentally, according to surveys by BNP Paribas, the average footfall value of the most prominent luxury locations nationwide (in pre-coronavirus times) was only 2,400 passing pedestrians per hour. This is a good example of the fact that there are sometimes far more important parameters at play than mere pedestrian footfall rates alone.
Apparently, it is not necessarily the number of people passing by on foot that matters, but increasingly the motivation of the buyers. And the best way to reach them is to know their qualitative composition and to anticipate the trend towards ever more specific, and above all more international, groups with specific customer needs at an early stage.
What the catering industry has been experiencing for some time, needing to adjust to an increasingly wide array of eating habits from the “high-quality Currywurst” served on a porcelain dish to a wide variety of burger and salad bowl offers, vegan meals to special dishes for frutarians or new Arabic fast food specialities, has only just begun in many areas of retail.
Individuality and thus also the ‘personal fit’ of a customised e-bike, a ‘finished’ ball gown or a unique piece made by a goldsmith is becoming increasingly important for customers who are generally willing to pay.
And it is precisely this additional service effort for retailers that could have the effect of enhancing attractiveness and thus playing an important part in saving the threatened city centres.
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