How Ikano Centres identified high-impact growth and defence opportunities across Malaysia
Speak to our retail analytics expertsThe challenge
Ikano Centres is the shopping centre division of Ikano Retail, part of the family-owned Ikano Group affiliated with IKEA. They operate five IKEA-anchored retail destinations in Malaysia and Thailand, designed as community “meeting places” rather than traditional malls.
The organisation needed a robust, data-led way to understand how each of their centres was performing within an increasingly competitive retail landscape. With multiple locations operating under very different competitive dynamics, the team required a consistent framework to answer a set of critical strategic questions:
- How does visitation share compare against each centre’s five main competitors?
- Where do visitors come from geographically, and which areas offer the greatest growth potential?
- How much cross-visitation exists between Ikano Centres and competitor locations?
- Which seasonal and holiday effects meaningfully influence footfall?
- Where is there realistic headroom to grow visits – and which high-performing areas must be actively defended?
To support these objectives, Ikano Insight analysed 27 unique retail locations across Malaysia, spanning all Ikano Centres and their respective competitive sets.
The solution
Ikano Insight developed a bespoke version of its Location Optimiser, integrating advanced location analytics with the Area Prioritisation Engine (APE) to deliver a fully self-serve intelligence solution tailored to Ikano Centres’ needs.
The solution combined four core components:
1. Standardised visitation analytics
Each location was evaluated using a consistent set of KPIs to enable direct comparison across the portfolio, including:
- Catchment area mapping
- Share of visitation and cross-visitation
- Visit frequency and dwell time
- Distance travelled
- Time-of-day and day-of-week patterns
- Opportunity and headroom by geography
This created a common analytical language for assessing performance across all centres and competitors.
2. Competitive and behavioural benchmarking
The platform enabled direct comparison between Ikano Centres and each centre’s competitive set, revealing:
- Where visitors overlap between locations
- Which centres demonstrate stronger visitor loyalty
- Where competitive pressure is highest
This allowed teams to distinguish between areas that required defensive strategies and those where growth could be realistically pursued.
3. Seasonality and holiday impact analysis
National and regional holidays were analysed separately, quantifying both positive and negative impacts on visitation by location. This enabled more informed planning around peak periods, low-demand days and location-specific seasonal effects.
4. Area Prioritisation Engine (APE)
APE was embedded directly into the mapping interface to support evidence-based geographic prioritisation. The engine:
- Compared neighbourhoods with similar demographic and distance profiles
- Predicted future visitation based on proven historic performance in comparable areas
- Categorised neighbourhoods into high, medium or low potential
- Quantified competitive difficulty and ranked areas by ease of acquisition
Crucially, visitation targets were grounded in real-world behavioural precedent, rather than linear forecasts or assumptions.
The outcome
The analysis delivered a clear, prioritised roadmap for each Ikano Centre – highlighting where to grow, where to defend and where to deprioritise effort.
Across the portfolio, the solution revealed that:
- A small number of neighbourhoods account for the majority of current visits
- High-potential growth areas are often also the most competitive, requiring focused and targeted strategies
- Several lower-competition areas offer efficient growth opportunities, even if absolute potential is smaller
- Defending existing high-performing catchments is just as critical as acquiring new visitors
At a centre level, this translated into highly actionable plans:
- IPC identified 8 priority areas to defend 4.7 million visits while driving an additional 430,000 visits
- Klippa focused on 10 key areas to defend 1.3 million visits and grow by 168,000 visits
- Toppen prioritised 11 areas accounting for 72% of visits, unlocking 955,000 additional visits
- MyTown identified 11 focus areas holding 64% of visits, with potential to grow by 735,000 visits over the next 18 months
The impact
By combining location analytics with predictive prioritisation, Ikano Centres are now equipped to:
- Make confident, evidence-based decisions on where to focus marketing and engagement activity
- Defend high-value catchments from competitive erosion
- Tailor strategies by geography, demographic profile and competitive intensity
- Align centre-level teams around a shared, objective view of opportunity
- Track performance and adapt approaches using a self-serve, interactive platform
With Location Optimiser and the Area Prioritisation Engine, Ikano Centres now have a scalable, repeatable framework to grow visitation, protect market share and allocate effort more effectively across their portfolio – location by location.
Area Prioritisation Engine becomes a fundamental marketing tool to target customer value growth around every store, across multiple national markets.
