The appointment returns in physical version after an exclusively digital 2020 edition, confinement requires. 4.000 participants from 42 countries are expected at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès - just under half of the 2019 edition - and the conferences can also be followed online.
For three days, 1.000 representatives of retailers and brands will meet real estate developers and investors and look at trends in the sector through the conference program.
They will revolve around the theme "People and places: a new chapter".
"The need to socialize, to experience an emotion, has never been stronger than since we experienced this difficult moment of confinement", analyzes Nathalie Depetro, director of Mapic, to AFP.
According to her, physical stores must therefore rely on this dimension of social bond, difficult to find when buying in front of a screen, to attract the public again. "And who says social link says leisure, catering and events", adds Ms. Depetro.
The pandemic has thus reinforced an already existing trend: that of mixing commerce with these activities, for example by creating sports facilities or play areas and increasing the surface area occupied by restaurants.
This year, half of the exhibition area of the show will be dedicated to leisure, catering or cultural brands, wishing to set up in commercial spaces.
Reinvent yourself to find customers
"Revisiting the way in which the layout of commercial places was imagined is mandatory, otherwise there will be no traffic," said Ms. Depetro.
Indeed, with the health crisis, the specialized trade lost 10% of its activity in stores between the first ten months of 2021 and the same period in 2019, according to figures from the Procos federation. Attendance is struggling to resume, especially in shopping centers, which had to close between February and May and impose the health pass in certain areas depending on the epidemic risk.
Certain sectors such as beauty or clothing have suffered more than others. "All the promoters agree in saying that it is necessary to limit the part of the textile", explains to AFP Gontran Thuring, general delegate of the National Committee of the shopping centers (CNCC).
To win back customers, commercial real estate professionals have only one word in their mouth: "omnichannel", the fact of being able to sell and communicate both physically and digitally.
Rather than seeing digital as the enemy to be defeated, they are trying to make it a complementary tool, for example by using social networks and data collected online to know customers better, and to personalize the customer experience. 'purchase.
"One of the very important issues is the ability of retailers and retail outlets to exchange this data", assures Ms. Depetero.
This shift to e-commerce also allows brands to reduce the size of their stores, to make them showcases for the brand or ephemeral stores, in which you can also collect items by "click and collect".
But beyond the "complementarity" displayed between sales in stores and online sales, some rivalries remain. In particular, commercial real estate professionals have not all digested the prohibition in the Climate Act to build shopping centers of more than 10.000 square meters to limit the artificialization of land, while e-commerce warehouses have escaped.