The Bullring Birmingham has introduced technology such as plasma screens and touch-screen kiosks as advertising and promotional tools to boost sales among its retail tenants.

The shopping centre, which is located in the heart of Birmingham and serves a population of 4.3 million, was revamped by The Birmingham Alliance and reopened its doors to business in September 2003. It comprises 150 shops, two department stores and 18 cafes and restaurants.

From the outset, the decision was taken to incorporate a site-wide IP network from Cisco Systems to provide voice, data and video capabilities, but wireless functionality was also added as of 1 January this year. Wireless has led some retailers to consider providing certain amounts of free WiFi access for returning customers as part of a loyalty scheme.

Ben Darji, network manager at the Bullring Birmingham, says the centre was used as a test bed by the Birmingham Alliance for other sites in its portfolio to measure the merits and potential pitfalls of using such technology to increase foot-fall and customer loyalty.

‘It was about business effectiveness and creating the facilities for tenants to improve their efficiency and profitability,’ he says. ‘But by introducing technology that perhaps had not been used elsewhere, it was also about creating an image and feeling that the Bullring was on the button.’

The shopping centre has 30 61-inch plasma screens, which provide information such as traffic updates, job vacancies and news reports from Reuters, and are also used by retailers for multimedia advertising campaigns. Specific adverts are displayed on the most appropriate screens and the Bullring manages the display content and timings.

The centre also provides consumers with 29 touch-screen kiosks, which supply information about shops and the Bullring itself, about the latest promotional offers, job opportunities, train times and road traffic updates. Facilities are provided for shoppers to check their bank accounts and, in future, they will also be able to purchase cinema and train tickets.

But Darji does not expect networking efforts to stop there. In time, he expects the WiFi network to push messages and offers to consumer mobile devices as shoppers walk by.

While the triangulation technology for wireless and IP networks exists to undertake such activity today, he acknowledges that launching a Bullring-wide loyalty scheme would require collating customer data, which means that data protection issues need to be explored.

‘Retailers could communicate weekly to us what they were going to have in their stores and we could push out that data to customers,’ says Darji.

‘But to launch a loyalty scheme of this type would require talking to retailers to understand their requirements and how it could benefit their business, so it is something to look at in the short to medium term.’