— Aurélien Khut, Marketing Innovation and Solutions Manager, Klépierre
About Klépierre
Klépierre is one of Europe's largest shopping center operators, managing more than 70 retail destinations across 10 countries — including France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. With millions of visitors moving through their centers every year, Klépierre sits at the intersection of physical retail and digital innovation.
Watch the full conversation on Mall Talkers
The challenge
For years, Klépierre's understanding of its visitors was largely limited to what those visitors were willing to say out loud. Surveys conducted in-mall provided a baseline, but the data was slow to collect, limited in volume, and constrained in what it could reveal about real shopping behavior.
At the same time, operating across multiple countries introduced a layer of complexity that no single off-the-shelf tool could address. Each market has its own culture, its own shopper expectations, and its own operational rhythms. Italy is not France. Scandinavia is not Eastern Europe. A standardized approach that ignored local nuance would fail — but a purely local approach would sacrifice the scale advantages that come with being a multi-mall operator.
The core challenges were:
- Shallow data: Survey-only insights couldn't reveal how visitors actually behaved while shopping
- No behavioral layer: Without a digital touchpoint, there was no way to understand real-time movement, preferences, or purchase intent
- Scale vs. local fit: Standardizing tools and KPIs across 70+ centers while preserving the flexibility local teams needed
- Physical blind spots: Data insights were disconnected from the physical layout of each center — a spike in foot traffic meant nothing without knowing which part of the mall it came from
The solution
Building a loyalty-driven data foundation
Klépierre's transformation began with the launch of its digital platform and, critically, a loyalty program — not just as a marketing tool, but as a foundational data infrastructure.
The loyalty program was designed with a deliberate value exchange in mind. Klépierre invested heavily in understanding what shoppers actually wanted in return for their engagement — and the answer went beyond discounts. Shoppers wanted to feel special. They wanted exclusive services. And increasingly, they wanted immediacy: a gamified experience where an action produced a reward right away, rather than requiring accumulated spend over time.
By designing around these expectations, Klépierre built a loyalty program that shoppers genuinely wanted to participate in — and in doing so, unlocked a continuous stream of behavioral data that surveys alone could never produce.
A platform mindset across 10 countries
Rather than building market-by-market in isolation, Klépierre developed centralized tools and frameworks that could be deployed across all centers — while co-building those tools with local teams from the start.
The principle is clear: standardize the data and the KPIs, but keep decision-making local. Central teams provide the tools and the framework. Ground teams, who understand their visitors, their culture, and their specific center, retain the authority to act on what the data shows.
Connecting data to physical space
One of the most important additions to Klépierre's toolkit has been spatial mapping. Using Mappedin's mapping platform, Klépierre is now able to connect data insights directly to the physical layout of each shopping center.
This proved to be a critical missing link. Klépierre had invested in understanding tenant synergies — identifying which brands, when co-located, consistently drive stronger performance for each other. But a data anomaly in one center couldn't be explained until the team looked at the physical map. One of the three synergistic tenants was located approximately ten minutes' walking distance from the others. The data signal made no sense without the spatial context. With the map, the answer was immediate.
This is now standard practice: data insights are always interrogated alongside the physical reality of the space.
AI as a focused, pragmatic tool
Klépierre is also in the early stages of integrating AI — approached not as a transformation initiative, but as a targeted effort to create genuine value where it matters most:
- Security: Applying AI to enhance safety and monitoring across all shopping centers
- Customer experience: An AI-powered chatbot enabling visitors to ask questions about their shopping experience in the moment — reducing friction and improving in-center navigation and service discovery
- Internal data access: Enabling teams to query data conversationally, replacing manual BI dashboard navigation with a simple prompt-based interface
The guiding principle: integrate AI where it creates a real difference, not for the sake of doing it. With 70+ centers across 10 countries and vastly different visitor demographics, from older shoppers to teenagers, accessibility and relevance aren't optional; they're the baseline for anything to work at scale.
— Aurélien Khut, Marketing Innovation and Solutions Manager, Klépierre
See Klépierre's Val d'Europe digital map →
Looking ahead
For Klépierre, retail media is the next major frontier. It's already emerging, but the shift is expected to accelerate — driven by both brand demand and evolving shopper expectations. Klépierre is investing in the tools and teams needed to lead in this space, building on the data foundation it has spent years constructing.
The path forward is clear: data is most powerful when it's grounded in physical reality, scaled with intention, and acted on by people who truly understand their centers. As that approach matures, the connection between insight and space will only become more central to how Europe's leading mall operators compete.
Share
