Retail vs repurpose: Levelling up the digital divide to tackle the challenge of disused space

So we now have a short presentation for you to listen to, which is titled Levelling up the Digital Divide, which is being presented by Mabie. So data has been analyzed on over 3.9 million UK businesses. It reveals that whilst 79% of consumers spend over seven hours a week on social media, only 19% of businesses post on a monthly basis. So the findings are all relevant to the Government's levelling up objectives with respect to restoring a sense of community and local pride in place. So delivering their findings from Mabie is Polly Barnfield obe, who is their chief executive and founder. And Polly, welcome. And over to you. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Delightful to be here today. So why am I at a high street conference talking about leveling up the digital divide? Isn't digital one of the reasons that the high street's failing? Well, we've all got one of these, right? So actually digital is part of the revival of the high street. It's part of how you bring people to place. Why are we here? Well, MABEE collects the data from 7.9 million businesses across the UK and the US and we do that on a daily basis, so we know what people are saying and where they're saying it. One of our clients are local authorities across the UK. We work with about 100 local authorities, we're part of the high streets, we're partnering on the High Street Task Force and we work with brands and retailers as well. But as part of that work, we've delivered 750,000 calls to local businesses. We've got 25,000 businesses in our current training cohort and through that we're delivering grants for about three quarters of a million pounds. And we delivered match funding of over £20 million in the licenses we give those businesses access to. It's given us a tremendous insight to what, what local businesses are struggling with, but also what larger brands are struggling with and how they empower their people to connect with humans. Because this is a human to human device. We all have a relationship, it's what takes us to where we're going. So what I want to talk to you about today is what is the problem? What happens when you fix it and how do you measure it? So I define the problem as this, which is almost the impact that digital has. This is a picture from a shopping center who had an influencer, you know, an influencer, social media influencer turn up and it filled the place. That was one person who had an audience was turning up there and everybody arrived to see them. While they were there, they bought coffee and they bought other stuff. It improved the economic output of that place for that day. So what you have to ask yourself is, when that influencer isn't there, what else are the businesses in that place saying? And who's conducting that noise they make? Because for the placemakers and the developers in this room, it's as important. What is the output from those businesses in the places you create is actually the places themselves, because that is the content that you see on your phone. And that is what increasingly drives us to make the decision about where we go and what we do. Because 80% of us spend at least seven hours a week on social media. So what you might say, 30% of retail is now E commerce. That's the piece that everybody said, well, that's the reason the high street's in trouble, is because it's all online. But 50% of that e commerce happens on a mobile. But 70% of retail is still offline. But the consumer is spending lots of time here. So add it up. Now, this is where it starts to unravel, because 75% of consumers use social media to find out about products and services, 74% use social media to search for stuff to buy. And 78% share good experiences on social media. That's what we see. We're going to go and go do something else. Now, here is the problem on the right hand side. Only 16% of businesses spend over 100 pounds a month on social media ads. Let me into a little secret. If you don't spend money with Mr. Meta, he doesn't show your content to anybody, so you're not reaching anybody. And of the businesses that are active on social media, only 27% can actually measure whether what they're doing is any good. So, bottom line, not spending very much. And I've got absolutely no flipping idea whether it's working. So here is the divide. Of the 3.9 million businesses in the UK that we track every day, and I mean every day, only 19% actually say anything on a monthly basis. Only 9% post something at the weekend, which is when you want to invite people to your places. And only 25% know whether what they're doing is working and actually spend five hours a month on managing their social media. That's less than the average individual spends on social media. Just think about that for a moment. Businesses spend less time managing social media than each of their consumers spend consuming it. There's an epic divide. And when you're in a room where you're discussing the physical investment in Place. The conversation about the digital infrastructure and the digital training that goes with it I think is critical. So I'll ask you again, what brings people to place? Yes, it's got to have all the right ingredients, but what that place is saying and the messages the businesses within that place convey is as critical as the architecture and the infrastructure you put in. So I'd like to share with you some stories from some of the businesses I work with that really brings into context the impact of what digital does for them. One of the key parts of what we do is we provide businesses with a way to look at how they compare. We take the data we collect and allow any business to say, how do I measure up? What do I look like? What does good look like? And we also know that social media is like a whole new language. It's like learning to speak a different way, but you do it person by person. And it's as much about tools as it is about training. And whether it's an SME or whether it is a brand. With 190 physical stores across the UK, it's how do you get your people to sing as part of your brand and how do you get people to invite other people to place? Because it comes back to the relationship. On this phone, I'd like to talk you through two stories. One is a lady called Keith Sophie Skerrett. She runs a small store in Cheltenham. She no longer runs that store. She during COVID spent 250 pounds and in six hours had 50,000 pounds back in her till through something she learned how to do on social media. Now, three years ago, our team was thrown out of her store. She said, I don't need to do this. I sell expensive shoes. It's not relevant. My ladies will not buy from me through digital. She is now so good at this that she pops up in John Lewis for a month at a time and when she turns up, the takings of John Lewis go up. So I go back to that crowd that I showed you in a shopping center and that was one influencer. Each one of your businesses in a place has the opportunity to be that influencer. She is one of them. Wherever she turns up physically, she brings a crowd with her and and she increases the incremental spend in that place, that is economic growth. Next door, Lauren, company ex model, runs three fashion businesses in Cirencester, Stonewold and Oxford. She's amazing at dressing up. When a stock arrives, she dresses up and she does lots of stories. She learned how to do one thing on social media and it added an extra four figures to her business every day for a tiny investment to learn how to boost her content to the right audience. It has had an unbelievable impact on her business, but it brings more people to the places where she is. So that investment in training has enabled her to impact footfall in place drives economic growth. Now, training is not a simple thing to deliver. It's really complex to get people to change their behavior. So what we have learned and would like to share is how you need to invest in an infrastructure that trains the people in the place to sing for the place. Instagram, for example, are going to start using the hashtags that people put in posts to link you, the consumer, to the map. So getting a business in a place to be able to use the right hashtags sounds a bit, you know, that's not important, is it? Well, it is important if consumers are spending so much time on social media and that's what drives where they go. So we believe you have to be very, it's almost boring, but you've just got to keep going at it. So we've created a process where you call, because you have to call these businesses, you can't reach them online and then you train them through email and email and the training has to be delivered on demand. You can't ask people to come to events like this because they're busy running the business, they're busy. So bite sized training on demand with vouchers. So if you turn up for 10 training events, you get a grant to spend on Facebook and you get trained how to use it. You got to show people how to turn money into more money. That's what drives economic growth and it does it very quickly. So it's about the tools and it's about live training. And the sooner you can do it, the sooner you start seeing results. So this is a snapshot from one of our clients who are allowed to share and you can see through just over £3,000 invested, that's £15,000 back in the till. Now, if you can do that repeatedly in a place, it's not just about the money that you're bringing in, it's about that person that's come in to then spend elsewhere. That is what delivers the cue, that is how you fill places up. So it's about shifting perception. It's no longer okay for it to be one person in the businesses that are social. It's got to be something that a whole business starts to think, well, how does my investment speak to the audience? How do I Train my people to be more social. How do I train my people to be part of this conversation? And that's about making the tools and the training accessible to everybody. So we're very keen on ensuring that everything that you can deliver can be embedded anywhere, so the training can live inside work environments, so that people can easily access and answer the questions they need answers to. So if you do all this, so what, how can you measure that what you've done has got impact and what do you measure? Because digital is almost over measured, there's so much measurement on it. But how do you connect it back to that physical investment you've made? This is a snapshot of the digital performance across the UK. And this is taking the top 25 places across the UK. I don't know whether you can see this, but what you can see is that Surrey, for example, has the most engaging audience in the sense of the businesses and the content and how people engage with it. But actually, even In Surrey, only 24% of businesses have a social media account and only 13.8% actually say anything. Now, let me into a little secret. Those 13.8% of businesses get disproportionate benefit. That is what levelling up is about, because those businesses that aren't are really struggling to reach their customer. But those 13% are having a massive benefit on the place. As a landlord, if you have businesses that are using their social media to only talk about their website and not talk about place, just think about where you're driving people to. Social media is a road that pushes people and moves people about. So what we're really excited to be doing is working with companies like Visitor Insights and others to bring together all of the data from place. So footfall data, social data, building data, ESG data, the revenue data where available to start to understand what is a place saying to me and how can I put everybody on the same page and have context? How do you know why that shopping centre was full? How do you find out what made something happen? Was it that road closure that meant that the sales were down? What is it that makes stuff happen? So I'd like to share with you a piece of work that is pretty fresh off the pipe and still very much a work in progress. But I believe it's a real future for the high street. This is a snapshot of a time lapse that we've been working on that overlays the social conversation from a place. And we're now overlaying footfall data. It could include the demographic data it will include all of the ESG data from the place, bus routes, taxis. So you can say, well, what if? Or why? And most importantly, you can all be on the same page in an organization rather than the data living in different places. What really good looks like for us is that AI starts to tell us on the day that you had the best footfall, these are the things that were happening because that's how you can repeat stuff. So hopefully, if technology works, you should now see a live time lapse of a conversation about the Queen's funeral in a location in the uk. I'm going to show you something very interesting here. Red equals negative and green equals positive. So we now have a time lapse playing of the conversation in a place every given timeline. Red is negative, green is positive. Now, sentiment analysis is an interesting thing because red, we all think is bad. People are saying bad things. Well, in this case, it wasn't a bad thing, it was just we were all sad. But if you link this with a Q, what you end up with is a big conversation about a sad thing that brought a lot of people together. And from my point is that for place management, that's so critical to be able to understand that in one place. So I believe the future is a blended one of digital and physical, because it's not. There's a lot of discussion about omnichannel retail. It's omnichannel place because we all have one of these. So digital activity contributes to pride in place and I believe is a really key driver of economic growth and it can happen really quickly because we all respond really fast to one of these. So if you can empower the businesses in a place to be more digital, you will have more people. Because what brought, ask yourself, what brought these people to this place? Can your place tell its story? Is it telling its story? And are you conducting the orchestra in the right way? So thank you very much. There's a large piece of research that we've done around the 3.9 million businesses in the UK. Love you all. To get a copy, we're going to stand at the back. Please do grab a piece of paper, scan the code and you will get the research. And I believe the future of the high street is exciting and it's a blended one that involves very physical and digital. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Polly. There's one question that's come in from Olivia Jackson who said, should local authorities be much more active on social media to reinforce place making and attract a younger generation?

Yeah, 100%. So one of the things, we have a webinar that we run for the High Street Task Force every month. And one of the things actually we're doing in the run up to Christmas is doing a session at 10 o' clock every Wednesday where we're doing exactly that and showing local authorities how they can reuse all of the content from their local businesses. Because that is actually the conversation that you want to reshare. You want to take the best content that your local businesses are creating and reshare that because. Because that is the voice of your place. Obviously, if you're running markets or any activity you're doing around Christmas. Absolutely. You need to think really seriously about how that message gets out. But don't forget that the content that the businesses in your place are creating is as important as the content you create yourself. And never forget that actually listening to what is being said on those posts is vital that you respond in a relevant and timely way, because the wrong message can get out of hand quite fast.

So how long before I walk into Starbucks down the road and they say, good morning, Mr. Laycock, would you like your usual Americano?

That's a great question. So you don't know this, but we were at Starbucks this week and we're working on a reuse project with them. And I think that the whole ability to be able to move that retargeting model that's seen online and drives online revenue so effectively to the offline world is a key part of how we make place successful.