Crossroads Plaza and ZCMI Center, two longtime rivals in the shopping mall industry, are banding together in an unusual business partnership to share advertising and promotions to lure more customers downtown and get more oomph from their advertising dollars.
Although they are competitors, officials for both malls say they can benefit from the arrangement."The idea is to bring in new people," said Tami Ivy, marketing manager for Crossroads Plaza. "We have a lot of cross shopping. Even though this has not been done before, it was something we thought we could take on and be successful with."
Ivy said mall marketing budgets typically grow in conjunction with the Consumer Price Index, but the advertising rates in the local media have been skyrocketing in the past few years. "We couldn't even maintain the same levels of advertising as before," she said.
Other malls nationally have tried joint advertising, but these have had the same owners. In this case, Crossroads is owned by Crossroads Plaza Associates, while ZCMI is owned by Zions Securities Corp., which in turn is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Having two different owners was "the biggest hurdle" but was ironed out, Ivy said. The fact that ZCMI is not open on Sundays also is not a problem because that will just be taken into consideration when scheduling events.
"Certainly we have opportunities to do community relations things together, specials together, sales promotions together. We are planning an ESPN promotion in May that will be in both malls with 100 years of sports memorabilia on display," Ivy said.
Mel Pearson, mall manager for ZCMI, is equally optimistic and predicts the joint efforts will "get people interested and let them know the downtown is open and available."
There still may be a perception that Main Street is torn up with construction or that parking is hard to find, but these promotions may help change that and bring in new customers.
"We still consider ourselves competitors, but we feel that if one does well, the other does well, so the more we can help each other it just is to our own benefit," Pearson said.
The two malls have done some joint promotions in the past and already coordinate parking validation service, he said.
The malls have hired Penna Powers Cutting & Haynes Advertising and Public Relations to develop their campaign.
Lori Hardy, account manager in public relations, said the first big joint promotion will be a fashion show in March.
"We've just developed their slogan: 'The downtown malls at the center everything,' " Hardy said. "We're trying to bring people back downtown -- the Jazz are downtown, the symphony is downtown, the most exclusive stores and the most unique items are downtown."