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Achieving a balanced tenant mix is a long-standing discourse in the retailing and consumer marketing literature. From the perspective of marketing mix planning, the diversity of tenants is beneficial to the performance of shopping malls. This paper aims to use a revealed preference approach to study empirically the effect of retail tenant mix planning on the rents of shopping malls.

This study adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to develop the Island-Species-Area-Energy model to study the shopping mall marketing and management framework. The empirical data are obtained from the 129 major shopping malls in the UK.

The results confirm that the retail tenant mix is positively associated with mall size and shopping district purchasing power, implying a tenant mix equilibrium. Any deviations from the tenant mix equilibrium will impose a negative impact on total retail rents. Further, five factors, i.e. tenant mix equilibrium, building quality, locational convenience, leasing strategy and anchorage, are found to be contributing factors to retail rents.

The findings contribute to the current body of marketing knowledge from two perspectives: first, tenant mix effects on retail rents are empirically analysed based on the biogeography theory, which shows a tenant mix equilibrium for retail marketing planning. Second, a five-factor model on shopping mall marketing and management mix framework is developed and tested for the performance of shopping malls.