Mall apps are generally designed to complement a shopper’s journey, serving basic in-mall information. While helping with navigation, or promotions, they are rarely interactive, personalised and often mirror the mall’s website. Thus, these apps end up being uninstalled, or, more often not even downloaded.

In Malaysia, the two most widely-used mall apps are from Sunway Pyramid and 1 Utama - two of the country’s (and the world’s) biggest malls. Both have a strong loyalty component, - a function IPC, as a mid-sized neighbourhood mall, didn’t have to fall back on.

With this in mind, we wanted to create an experience that would excite and potentially even delight consumers. We wanted to ensure both downloads and sustained usage, and more ambitiously, increased visits and F&B spending at IPC.

Our goal - 10,000 downloads (client KPIs) within the campaign period (February - Dec 2018), and 3,000 promotion redemptions within the same period.

It’s no secret that Malaysia is a foodie nation, but with all the food options available to them, they find themselves asking the same question everyday: “What to eat?”

With IPC doubling up on its F&B offerings to accommodate rapidly growing consumer demand for F&B offerings, the choice would only get harder. So, we thought — why not ease the decision-making process and offer an answer to our customers’ constant food dilemma?

Enter: The Mood Menu — the ground-breaking feature in IPC’s mobile app feature that analyses personal music data to recommend restaurant choices to users based on their mood — a world’s first! There’s a choice for every mood — whether to jive with the positive vibes or to beat the shopper’s blues.

The music we listen to reflects our mood, and our mood affects the way we taste our food.

We thought to answer the daily conundrum of every Malaysian with this insight, based on consultation with Professor Robin Dando of Cornell University. His groundbreaking research found that our current mood can inhibit — or accentuate — the taste of what we eat.

We then leveraged the rich data repository that an app over 5 million of Malaysians already have on their phones — Spotify. From users’ recent music history, various data points from the songs — genre, tempo, volume, valence, instrumentation density, orchestration, key and even playback & skip frequency — could be used to understand their moods.

With Spotify’s 30 million-strong collection of songs, our app’s proprietary algorithm would be fed with a wealth of real-time data, providing unique and personalised F&B recommendations every time users ran The Mood Menu.

Here’s how The Mood Menu works:

Users are first prompted to connect The Mood Menu to their Spotify account.

The app feature identifies the user’s most recent playback and determines the user’s mood via various data points (genre, tempo, volume, etc -as mentioned earlier) The algorithm features 7 moods — happy, sad, stressed, in love, relaxed, pumped, sleepy — which are matched to key flavour profiles for each of IPC’s 50+ food outlets.

The Mood Menu then displays the user’s result, and recommends a restaurant with a corresponding offer and promo (e.g., free lunch set) redeemable immediately.

To get the word out about The Mood Menu, we developed a digital PR program that let 10 influencers and content creators put the spotlight on the mobile app featuring in their own personal style that appealed to their sizeable fanbases. In total, they delivered 22 entertaining videos that ranged from short films to vlogs to romcoms to infomercials.

Overall, The Mood Menu experience provided a unique retail experience, all based on real time user data and a proprietary learning algorithm that drove moments of surprise and delight.

All while delivering real commercial value to IPC and its F&B tenants.

The IPC Shopping Centre mobile app obtained 47,000 downloads within the campaign period - more than 4 times (400%) the targeted number of downloads (10,000). The app became the #1 trending lifestyle app on Google Play Store in June 2018 (We dethroned Tinder!) With a rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, it was and still is the #1 rated shopping centre app on Google Play Store.

The Mood Menu drove 3,294 promo redemptions within the first 3 months, smashing our campaign target and eventually hitting 5,038 redemptions, overindexing our target by 168%.

We also increased overall footfall by 39% — a massive win for IPC and its tenants.

Finally, the brand saw a lot of buzz online and offline, garnering 1.8 million engagements on social media, while generating over USD 380,000 (Overindex by 152% vs. target) in PR value across 151 publications.