As the world’s first and only mobile app feature to integrate personal music data with cutting-edge food and neuroscience, IPC’s Mood Menu redefined the way a shopping centre app engages with consumers.

When IPC relaunched its brand and shopping centre in 2018, it also doubled its F&B offerings. With a new leaf turned, we reinvented the traditional mall app into a delightful and curated brand experience, that would launch shoppers onto a retail and culinary adventure to discover IPC’s diverse F&B options.

We delivered a personalised experience based on moods, by matching customers’ musical tastes with their taste buds.

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.

Malaysia is a foodie nation, and Malaysians are always asking each other “what should we eat?”. And with IPC doubling up on its F&B offerings to accommodate rapidly growing consumer demand for a wide variety of F&B offerings, the choice was only getting harder. So, we thought - why not ease the decision-making process and offer an answer to our customers’ daily dilemma of “what to eat?”.

Based on an incredible insight that human emotions and moods influence our sense of taste, the Mood Menu was born - the ground breaking feature within IPC’s mobile app that analyses consumers’ moods to recommend restaurant choices within the shopping centre - a world’s first!

To analyse users’ moods, we looked towards an app that more than 5 million Malaysians already have on their phones - music streaming giant, Spotify - and forged a partnership to develop a proprietary algorithm that would analyse the users’ music playback and streaming behaviour to determine their mood.

We also collaborated with world’s foremost expert in the field of food science and taste psychology - Professor Robin Dando, PhD. of Cornell University. Based on his landmark 2015 study on human moods and their ability to inhibit or accentuate flavours, and consultation with the Professor himself, we were able to attribute restaurant choices to accommodate each mood.

As a final push, IPC’s tenants were roped in to tie promotions and discounts to the restaurant recommendations, to incentivise users to visit their outlets and drive increased sales.

How the Mood Menu works:

1. Users connect the Mood Menu to their Spotify account.

2. The app analyses the user’s 10 most recently played songs (via tempo, genre, valence, instrumentation, density, BPM) and streaming behaviour (track repeats, skips) to determine the user’s mood; which the algorithm then clusters into 7 moods - happy, sad, stressed, in love, relaxed, pumped, sleepy - and finally matched to the key flavour profiles of each of IPC’s 50+ food outlets.

3. The Mood Menu displays the user’s result.

Example: HAPPY users will be recommended to Nando’s with a 30% off discount, based on the sour taste profile.

Promoting The Mood Menu:

In May 2018, we collaborated with top content creators to promote the Mood Menu as THE answer to Malaysians’ daily dilemma of “what to eat?”.

During the same period, we ran ads on Spotify, Facebook, and Instagram to drive downloads & trial.

App Performance:

The IPC Shopping Centre app obtained 47,000 downloads within the campaign period- more than 4x the download targets.

The app was also the #1 trending lifestyle app on Google Play Store in June 2018 (It dethroned Tinder!).

With a rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, the IPC app is the #1 rated shopping centre app on the Google Play Store.

Source: Apple App Store & Google Play Store (February-Dec 2018)

Tenant Promotions:

In the first three months, The Mood Menu drove 3,294 redemptions, smashing our campaign target. By the campaign end, we overachieved our targets by 168%, achieving 5,038 redemptions.

Source: IPC Sales Report

Footfall:

The IPC app contributed strongly to a 39% increase in footfall (vs. 2017) during the campaign period.

Source: IPC Footfall Analysis

PR Buzz:

The Mood Menu featured organically in 151 media outlets, garnering a total PR value of USD380,000.