2014 was the 20th year of the MAPIC awards and the top awards were handed out at a gala dinner in Cannes, France, on the delightful Cote d’Azur. The popularity and influence of this event can be seen in the fact that over 8,300 international participants took part this year.
Over 2,400 retailers and 2,300 property developers met up for 3 days of exhibitions, networking possibilities and industry conferences. In total, 75 countries were represented here and 500 retail companies made their first ever appearance at MAPIC.
The winners in the different categories this year were as follows:
Best Fashion & Footwear Retail Concept – Uniglo, Japan
Best Food & Beverage Retail Concept – Vapiano, Germany
Best New Retail Concept – Causses, France
Best Retail Global Expansion – KIKO Milano, Italy
Most Innovative Shopping Center – Qwartz Villeneuve-la-Garenne, France
Best Factory Outlet Center – Fashion Outlets of Chicago, Rosemont, IL, United States
Audacity, Dynamism and Capacity to Innovate
Nathalie Depetro is a MAPIC director and she said that the mood among retailers at the event was “extraordinary”. She went on to point out that the retailers were “proving their audacity, dynamism and capacity to innovate” by breaking out from their own national markets and into new international territories.
Away from the awards, one of the most interesting things touched upon at MAPIC was the need to converge, rather than raise competition levels between online and offline retailers. An example of this can be seen already, with China’s Wanda Group moving from its traditional shopping mall developments into a joint e-commerce venture with online firms Baidu and Tencent Holdings. What this sort of joint venture does is create a link between a leading construction firm and big online companies.
An interesting snippet of information released during MAPIC came from real estate and investment firm CBRE. They said that 74% of people carry out specific online searches before shopping. However, their survey of 32,000 people revealed that 79% of them still visit physical retail outlets as well as using the internet.
