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June 03, 2005
More on the "Shoppingtown" branding change
Tampa Bay-area (FL) blogger Costa Tsiokos adds more ongoing commentary about Westfield's stupidiy regarding the "Shoppingtown" name via PopulationStatistic.com. Tsiokos references this St. Petersburg Times article from May 8, 2002:
Forget the mall; now it's 'shoppingtown'
By MARK ALBRIGHT and CHRISTINA K. COSDON
May 8, 2002Three of the Tampa Bay area's largest malls have new Australian owners. Now they're getting new names.
Westfield Group, which this week completed its purchase of Brandon TownCenter, Citrus Park Town Center and Countryside Mall, is adding "shoppingtown" to those names.
"We've called our properties in Australia 'shoppingtowns' since the 1960s," said Stephen Fluhr, general manager of newly renamed Westfield Shoppingtown Brandon. "In Australia, a mall is a shoppingtown."
Work crews this week began sticking the new names on doors and customer service booths at the malls, whose new names include Westfield Shoppingtown Citrus Park and Westfield Shoppingtown Countryside. Eventually pylon signs at mall entrances will be changed to match the rest of the company's portfolio of 61 U.S. malls and shopping centers.
Not everybody's a fan of the new names. "My wife just called and said people are up in arms," said Clearwater Mayor Brian Aungst, "The mall is not moving out of Countryside, is it? To me, Countryside Mall is a perfect name. This is a dumb idea."...
The name changes mark the latest attempt by mall owners to use their real estate holdings to promote their corporate brand. The effort spread once the companies became publicly traded stocks.
Simon Property Group of Indianapolis has plastered its name all over the parking lots and doors of its Tyrone Square, Gulf View Square and Crystal River malls. Prime Retail Inc. of Baltimore added the name at its Prime Outlets Ellenton property. Mills Corp. of Arlington, Va., which owns Sawgrass Mills in Broward County, puts its corporate monicker in all of its outlet mall names.
Contrast this with the "about face" that Westfield is doing, noted in this June 1, 2005 St. Petersburg Times article:
If you didn't call them 'shoppingtowns,' don't
By MARK ALBRIGHT, Times Staff Writer
June 1, 2005Westfield Group has stopped calling its U.S. malls "shoppingtowns."
The Australian developer, which drew a lot of attention with the unusual monicker when the company made landfall in the states three years ago, began phasing it out May 1.
With no fanfare, the owner of three malls in the Tampa Bay area stopped ordering business cards, signs, brochures and other materials that make any reference to "shoppingtown."
"We won't be taking down signs to change the name, you just won't see us putting it on replacements as time goes by," said Catherine Dickey, spokeswoman for the chain. "The name served its purpose."
While rival malls in the market have made "mall" or "plaza" part of their formal name, Westfield did not. So the three local malls now will be called Westfield Citrus Park, Westfield Brandon and Westfield Countryside. "People know they are malls," Dickey said.
Westfield imported the "shoppingtown" label for its U.S. properties from what they are called in Australia. One reason was to send a signal to shoppers that things had changed at their nearby mall. Many shoppers never picked up the hint or ignored it. But Westfield officials are unconcerned that "shoppingtown" never became a household word.
"Shoppingtown is part of our heritage, but Westfield is the brand," Dickey said.
Westfield could have saved themselves a lot of money if they just would have looked at the U.S. market and note that, well, malls are called malls! I swear that company is run by idiots.
Posted by Tannerman at June 3, 2005 12:16 PM | Categories: Other Malls | Westfield