Richard Scase

Richard Scase
Music Fund

The Richard Scase Music Fund
Events

The Fight for Competitive Avantage

Event: Rethink Retail

for BCSC Shopping Centre Management Conference at Manchester Central Convention Centre

04 March 2008

Richard Scase gave the Opening Keynote Speech to a packed audience of more than 600 delegates. He outlined many of the short-term challenges facing the property development sector and how this would affect retail outlets. He predicted the credit crunch would put the US economy into recession and this would have repercussions for Europe and the UK. He forecast a fall in consumers spend over the next couple of years as utility price hikes impact upon household budgets.

He then shifted his attention to some longer-term trends in consumer markets, ranging from changing demographics through to the erosion of traditional marketing categories. He stressed how life-styles and demographics in the UK are now so diverse that segmenting the market on the basis of age, occupation, income and other well-established marketing groups was now too simplistic for strategic business purposes. These need to be supplemented by the analysis of emerging life style ‘tribes’. The shopping centre offer needed to reflect this diversity to a far greater extent than it had done in the past.