MAPIC 2020 flagship theme revealed

Right now the retail market is facing a day-to-day challenge, from how to look after staff to how to pay rent, keeping each business viable, working with the supply chain and trying to share the burden so that the industry can come through this crisis together and rebuild. This will require Embracing Collaborative Retail to focus on new business models for retail, mixing uses, compelling cities, refurbishment and extensions, sustainability and the innovation that underpins all of these.

Collaboration? This new approach requires retailers, brands, operators, developers and investors to engage with Embracing Collaborative Retail, creating mixed-use projects that enrich their environments, enhance their locations and create a profitable and sustainable future. Our industry's revival relies on us pulling together and rebuilding with each other.

To succeed and prosper in the new retail age, retailers and brands must rethink their business models, productions, their use of physical and digital assets and how they create new customer experiences. The understanding of new consumer expectations and habits will redefine the future.

But these changes will have to be executed in a sustainable way.  Investment, development and consumer priorities all require that new and redeveloped assets must be sustainable, ethical, reflect and meet local production and community needs. Technology and digital innovation will be at the heart of many of these new business models.

This changes everything in the retail environment. Shopping centres are transforming into wide-ranging, mixed-use lifestyle destinations and densifying their footplates to accommodate leisure, F&B, work spaces, residential, healthcare and well-being and even logistics. Entertainment will play a key role in shaping the future of retail. More than that, however, we have witnessed the incredible enthusiasm of the industry to learn, share and embrace new ideas around experience.