It can be tricky to access data for South Africa’s malls and shopping centres because of the various holding companies and foot count technologies involved. The challenge is even more daunting when you don’t own the ecosystem, and are a supplier or tenant in a shopping centre.

Lightstone’s independent measurement solution, Behavioural Dynamics, provides a universal way of measuring shopping mall activity that is consistent and makes comparisons easy.

With Behavioural Dynamics you can quantify and profile the consumer visit patterns to over 1 000 shopping centres and malls in South Africa, and see how activity changes over time, or compare a mall against its competitors.

One of the most exciting aspects Behavioural Dynamics offers is the ability to see where visitors come from, and work it back to figure out the preferences of different suburbs and profiles of visitors.

This means you can target the residents of a suburb when they are out shopping because you know which shopping centres they frequent most, and whether they take frequent convenience trips or longer outings to regional malls.

The trick is to find them at the right place, and speak to them in their language.

Lightstone’s data uses the daily movements of more than 600 000 vehicles, weighted against the most detailed vehicle population dataset available, to give month-by-month views of the busiest 1 000 shopping centres and malls in South Africa.

The data spreads across all income bands, geographies, vehicle types and vehicle ages in South Africa, and we monitor the national population and statistical weighting to ensure the data remains fresh each month.

Behavioural Dynamics allows you to understand the landscape of South African malls over 12 months by accessing historical seasonal patterns and new data as it emerges. There’s no need to install hardware or contract with landlords for their figures and you can have confidence in the comparability of data.