Erin Young Post 3: What Is? (Discover Phase)
As our team first developed our target market, we thought we knew what drove us to go to shopping malls and why they were in decline. Our initial beliefs were that malls existed mainly as convenient places to sell clothes and thus began to suffer with the introduction of online shopping and later the pandemic. However, our secondary research demonstrated that malls offer consumers an entertainment area, a social place to meet with friends or family outside of home life. We were shocked to see the impact malls had across the world, and how the function they have as a public forum contributed to political discussions in other countries where they were used as places of protest. We recognized the mall as somewhat of a generic space, our collective image being of white tile and glass windows looking into stores despite our references being malls hundreds of miles apart. While we assumed this was just a design choice our research revealed that the design of the mall allo...