Twelve Hours at The Mall

The observation across Southeast Asia is real, sprawling shopping centers have become de facto town squares, with petting zoos, worship services and weddings. As traditional retail struggles, some US malls are now borrowing the formula without the context. Southeast Asian malls work because they are the culture-driven. The petting zoo, the wedding hall, the prayer room — those aren’t experiential add-ons. They are the logical expression of how people in Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur… organize community life. The mall filled a vacuum that existed, becoming the town square because that’s what culture and the market needed it to become.

US landlords seeing that and thinking “we should add a petting zoo” is the same category error KKR made with bicycles. When the thesis is a trend, fundamentals become foe —investment horizons have thin margins for being wrong, and thinner durability. The “experiential mall” thesis isn’t a miss. The question is whether what’s being imported is a format or a feeling. Format is copy and paste. Feeling is not.

Institutional capital is structurally allergic to what actually makes this work. Their mandate at the asset level is, almost without exception, standardization — and standardization is precisely what splinters the cultural resonance that makes Southeast Asian malls a sticky success. 

The flea market on the neighborhood corner thrives not despite being informal and unrepeatable, but because of it. It is a built translation of who lives there. The mall on the thoroughfare fails because it was never a translation of anything — it was a deployment of capital into a tested format, hoping the format would generate culture rather than the other way around.

Jim Rohn’s framing of value cuts right to crux of the matter: the value you bring must be real, not rented. A landlord importing Southeast Asian mall vibes into suburban Cincinnati isn’t bringing value to that market — they’re bringing a pitch deck. 

Culture is structural. It is both a container and support. Malls located in certain immigrant-dense suburban corridors, specific urban neighborhoods with strong existing community gravity — is precisely where an expansive, mixed-use, culturally porous format would resonate because it’s capable of meeting real existing social need, of the people, the market. Here it is examining the fabric and knitting with respect. A distant cry from a copy, paste of an Asian formula.

Elsewhere? Landlords risk missing the mark because the value they bring is superficial, it is not structurally supported — it has no roots. It is easily displaced by market winds, and before the reports realize it, what remains is but a structural shell: A fundamentally misaligned asset hallowed at the core because of faulty translation. 

Avoid the impulse to import. Choose instead to curate consciously and cautiously. This is how you write a successful value-add turnaround, and not your next write-down.