Nexus Select Malls’ CMO Nishank Joshi explains why experiences, communities and exclusivity are becoming retail’s biggest growth drivers
For nearly two decades, the End-of-Season Sale (EOSS) has meant one thing to Indian shoppers – the annual ritual of hunting for a deal. This year, Nexus Select Malls intends to change that story entirely, starting with the name itself.
The company has rebranded its EOSS campaign as the ‘End of Sadness Sale,’ a deliberate pivot away from discount-first messaging toward positioning its malls as destinations for recreation, discovery and social connection.
Nexus Select Malls spends nearly Rs 100 crore annually across digital campaigns, shopping events and in-mall activations. In an extended conversation with BW Marketing World, Nishank Joshi, Chief Marketing Officer of Nexus Select Malls, laid out the thinking behind the shift, and the numbers that are driving it.
Planned Premium Shopping
Joshi, who has been in the mall business since 2007, says the biggest change isn’t the discount itself but how deliberately consumers now plan around it.
“Earlier, there used to be only two shopping windows. Now, as retail has evolved, consumers know there are going to be three or four large shopping windows in a year,” he says.
The predictability, he argues, has fuelled a wave of premiumisation because style has stopped being confined to metros. “Consumers there want to be just as fashionable as people in the metros. Style no longer has a region because it is so easily accessible everywhere,” Joshi says of tier two and three markets.
The behaviour, he notes, mirrors what’s happening online. “A lot of people keep adding products to their online carts and wait for the discounts because they know that, eventually, the prices will drop. Similarly, in offline retail, consumers know exactly when the sales are going to begin. They’ve already lined up the products they want, and they’re simply waiting for the discounts to kick in,” he adds.
Loyalty Engine Moving Sales
If instant gratification was quick commerce’s calling card, Nexus Select Malls has been building its own version for nearly a decade. The company embarked on offline shopping rewards seven to eight years ago – starting with vouchers and scaling up to silver and gold coins, with hyper-regional twists like Golden Temple replicas in Chandigarh and Amritsar.
That programme has since evolved into the Nexus One app, which today counts over one million users and more than one lakh monthly active users across the company’s mall portfolio. Consumers upload their bills for instant rewards, redeemable immediately or banked for bigger payouts later.
“Nexus One consumers now contribute almost 12 to 13 per cent of the entire sales value uploaded across the Nexus portfolio”, reveals Joshi. The app has also become the backbone of a remarketing machine.
Building Cults
Where Nexus Select Malls is placing its biggest bet, however, is experiential – the category IPs designed to turn a mall visit into a cultural event rather than a shopping errand.
There’s ‘Techstination’, a September-October property built around consumer electronics; Gloss Box, a beauty-focused activation featuring free makeovers, masterclasses and kiosks from brands like Nykaa and Tira; the Sneaker & Denim Fest each May-June, complete with rap battles, basketball games and sneaker customisation stations; and Vacation Nation, an April-May travel-themed property built around co-ords, luggage and sneakers for the summer holiday rush.
“What we’re trying to do here is not just offer discounts. We’re trying to build a whole community and bring the entire ethos of that trend or cult into the offline world,” Joshi says.
Cultural relevance extends to festivals too. This year, for the first time, Nexus Select Malls is staging a full pandal-based Durga Puja experience at both South City Mall in Kolkata and Select Citywalk in Delhi. The latter is chosen for its large CR Park catchment and strong Bengali community, with décor artists brought in directly from Kolkata. It’s an extension of a playbook Nexus Select Malls has already run with eco-friendly Ganpati celebrations in western India and Hyderabad, community-led Onam celebrations in Seawoods, Mumbai, and Rath Yatra festivities at its Bhubaneswar mall, including the lesser-known Boita Bandana, a local festival marking the end of the monsoon.
The Media Flip
“Up until two years ago, our media mix was 70 per cent traditional and 30 per cent digital. Today, it’s still 70:30, but the other way around. It is 70 per cent digital and 30 per cent traditional,” Joshi shares when asked about Nexus Select Malls’ media mix
Connected TV is chosen specifically for its targeting and contextual capabilities. Horizontal ad formats have all but disappeared except on YouTube, replaced by vertical creative. QR codes embedded in OTT ads now route viewers straight to live offers on the Nexus One app, while a partnership with Uber pushes discounts to users travelling near a Nexus Select Malls’ property — with the ability to track footfall intent in real time.
“Malls are extremely catchment-driven. That’s the good thing about social media, Uber and platforms like these. They allow you to advertise very precisely within your catchment. You can concentrate your efforts in that geography,” he says.
Nexus Select Malls has also renewed its partnership with District, having run it during the brand’s last 50 per cent off campaign and set to activate it again for the next 50 per cent off event on 14-16 August. As Joshi puts the whole strategy into one line stating, “The simplest barometer is to go where the consumers are, and then redirect them to your mall by being relevant.”
Experiential spend follows a different, more seasonal curve. Across a full year, Joshi pegs the split between media and experiential at roughly 50:50, but that number swings hard around the festive calendar. “During Diwali, around 35 per cent of our annual experiential cost is incurred, while media accounts for about 30 per cent of the spending,” he reveals.
Ticketing is increasingly offsetting those costs. Dinosaur experiences, dragon festivals and select Christmas activations are now ticketed events, and when that revenue is netted against spend, Joshi estimates experiential effectively accounts for 60-70 per cent of total investment, even though the company doesn’t usually calculate it that way, since ticketing offsets “50-70 per cent of the costs.”
“That’s how large experiential has become. That’s something online companies simply can’t replicate. They don’t have physical spaces where they can create experiential events. That’s our biggest differentiator,” he adds.
The Physical Shopping Moat
For all the digital culture, Joshi is explicit that physical retail isn’t going anywhere, and he credits “body diversity” as an important factor. Indian body shapes vary so widely, sizing isn’t standardised the same way across brands, which effectively pushes shoppers into stores to try garments on before buying.
“The last three months have been great. There has been a distinct increase in both footfalls and sales,” Joshi notes. He also flagged an unusual barometer for mall health – box office performance. “Films have also done well, which is a very good barometer. Whenever there are good movies, F&B performs exceptionally well. The numbers for F&B simply go through the roof,” he adds.
What’s Next
The company is preparing to venture ‘First at Nexus’, an initiative under which new product collections will debut at Nexus Select Malls a week to 10 days before reaching other retail destinations.
“You’ll now see products and entire merchandise collections launching at Nexus Select Malls a week or even 10 days before they reach other malls. That’s the initiative we’re calling First at Nexus,” Joshi explains.
Pickleball tournaments are set to roll out across the portfolio next, followed by the continuation of the District partnership and a run of Diwali, Christmas and Marvel-themed activations through the year-end. “It’s a packed six to eight months ahead for Nexus Select Malls,” Joshi states.
