A couple of weeks ago, I was on my typical mall walk at Willow Bend Mall in Plano. I saw a couple people I knew from the mall wheeling a cart and mentioned were they opening or closing a store. The answer was, neither, we are having a marketing town hall meeting and would you like to sit in. In this case it was actually stand and watch as it was a better angle to see what was going on.
A word of background here, is the Willow Bend mall has been under a black cloud since it opened in the summer of 2001. Within a couple of months after the mall opened, we all sadly experienced the horrors of 9.11 and almost all retail suffered for a few months. There was also the "tactical" error of trying to have mainly only "high-end" stores which the average person could not really afford. All this lead to my favorite reason for walking there was this the mall no one went to.
Then a few years ago, they opened up some nice eateries in the fall of 2019 and there was a movie theater which was almost completed. The mall had a booming holiday season and was really hitting it's stride and as some of us remember, the world basically shut down in March of 2020.
I do understand this is more background than you probably want to hear about the mall's issues but the marketing department was very honest and very well aware of what the goal of the new owners' are to re-imagine the mall and add things to help bring more people to the mall. One idea is to make the mall something similar to the Watters Creek center in Allen, Tx where my office happens to be. The office is literally across the street from Kyle Robertson's and his teams successful Dallas Card Show.
The point of all this is just how important marketing and relationships are and will be to the future success of Willow Bend and isn't this something similar to the sports card market.
What I'd really love to hear is how you market yourself and your store/business to draw in more customers. I mentioned in a thread ro my good hobby friend Beau Spencer Thompson about all the places I use to publicize my small Adat Chaverim show. He was amazed by all the different places I reach out and I'm always looking for more. So the goal of this article is I'd love to hear all your ways of getting the word out about your show or stores. Photo is from a Madison Card Show and look at this crowd which is an average day for that show. But even Beau looked at my list and said he could do even better on promotion. And that's my point, we all can do better and the more we do the better off we are.
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