The paper provides some insight about how retail tenants form favourable
perceptions about the centre brand. All of the results suggest that the level of service
quality provided by centre management is the most powerful way of enhancing brand
attitudes. Shopping centres wishing to increase the level of favourable perception need
to improve the level of service quality, including cleanliness, ambiance and promotions
and other marketing. The shopping centre brand has both external and internal roots.
If centre managers can improve consumer traffic through better promotions or special
events then that will help. Equally, improved management activities around the centre
can also improve how well the brand is perceived. In a similar way, greater
empowerment can also help to improve brand attitudes, as held by the retail tenants. In
this sense, empowerment can be thought of as a type of internal branding, involving
the tenant as a B2B customer in the co-determination of decisions and thus the brand.
Further insight into centre management comes from the models of retail tenant
empowerment. The very high and significant constant term in the relevant regressions
indicate that there are specific behaviour and activities that the centre management can
do to portray their encouragement of empowerment by retailers. Restraining power
and greater flexibility can be used to assist empowerment. Reducing power is not
sufficient to get empowerment. Empowerment also requires flexibility and other more
explicit measures, such as responsiveness.