SERVICES OF SHOPPING CENTRES: SUBSTANTIVE ANALYSIS

Shopping centers play an important role in the organization of sale of goods and delivery of services and ensuring access of consumers to modern goods and services. Due to this, both in theoretical studies and in practical activities, much attention is paid to the development and implementation of tools designed to improve the performance of shopping centers. However, the content of the services that shopping centers provide to their core audience (and in which the essence of their activity lies) is practically not investigated. Lack of understanding of the nature of this service leads to the fact that tools for increasing shopping centers performance are developed and applied with no proper theoretical basis, which reduces their potential. The objective of the work is to identify organizational and economic nature of the services of shopping centers to create a theoretical basis to develop tools to improve their performance. The article analyzes the works devoted to the problems of studying the essence of the shopping center service. It was revealed that accordning to these works, shopping centers function as a bilateral platform, and at the same time they are network coordinators of the activities of their tenants. It is shown that two key types of core audience of shopping centers are tenants and buyers. The essence of the service of shopping centers for these two main groups of stakeholders is discribed. It is shown that shopping centers create conditions for tenants to maximize the effective sale of their goods and services (they form the business environment), and in favour of tenants conditions for the realization of the consumer behavior model (i.e. also form the appropriate environment) are created. The tools that shopping centers use to solve this problem are described. Internal and external components of the shopping center service are revealed. It is shown that the activity of shopping centers relies rather on their intellectual capital (necessary to create an environment for interaction between outlets and consumers) than on their physical resources.