Joburg Shopping Festival launches at Sandton City, Oriental Plaza

It will offer price deals, sales, gifts with purchases, competitions and giveaways including trips to visitor attractions, trips, prepaid Visa cards, fashion, jewellery and more. Shoppers should also keep a look out for the Visa Superman, who will be popping by to pay the bills of lucky shoppers.

Joburg receives domestic and regional visitors, who come to look for inspiration, check on the latest fashion and lifestyle trends and shop for both personal and retail resale usage. The JSF provides an ideal platform for just that and showcases Joburg's shopping as a big city urban lifestyle offering.

From a partnership perspective, the objective of the Joburg Shopping Festival is to run a successful pilot project in 2014 to build a model for an annual event that will ultimately:

• Attract more visitors from around Africa to Gauteng. (Shopping is a key draw card for 30% of African visitors)
  
• Increase the retail spend at both the high end (fly-ins from key sub Saharan markets) and value/bulk spenders (SADC land arrivals)
  
• Encourage them to stay longer and enjoy what the city has to offer in terms of tourism and leisure experiences
  
• Contribute to job creation and skills development in the retail and tourism sectors

Bree Street corridor to benefit

However, the City's involvement goes a lot deeper and has a serious economic development aspect to it. With the focus on skills and SMME development, as well as job creation, part of the City's involvement with the shopping festival includes exposing retailers in the Bree Street Corridor to the concept, and preparing them for future shopping festivals.

College students have been trained as festival ambassadors and are engaging with retailers in the Bree Street area about this and future festivals, as it is the City's vision to take the festival to numerous nodes throughout Joburg in future years. This training and promotion exercise by the students will be followed up by research, measuring the impact of this initial festival by participating traders in both the Bree Street retail corridor and the two shopping centres involved.

Following other iconic festivals

Shopping festivals take place all over the world and are known for drawing millions of shoppers and tourists every year. The Joburg Shopping Festival is modelled on perhaps the most successful of these festivals, the Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF), an initiative of the Dubai government to promote trade in the region and which been so successfully promoted as a tourist attraction.

The DSF is a month long event that sees shoppers enjoying shopping discounts on everything from cars, electronics and computers to fashion, jewellery and perfumes, entertainment events, and daily car and gold raffles. It attracts between four and five million visitors over the month.

It took 18 years for the Dubai Shopping Festival to grow to its current size and success, but the Johannesburg partners hope to be able to learn from the DSF experiences to create its own iconic event. It would like to use this first year to begin preparing its retailers for a long-term relationship with the Joburg Shopping Festival, in order to ensure broader economic success in the years to come.

Visa utilises the festival as a platform to educate shoppers about the convenience and security of electronic payments while simultaneously rewarding them with value-added prizes. It is also a sponsor of the DSF and the Thailand Grand Sale.

For more information, go to www.joburgtourism.com or www.joburg.org.za.