A line up around the block and 77% Consumer Recall

About 2 months before their scheduled grand opening, the new Marketing Director for Woodward Place invited us to pitch the account. We had 2 weeks to come up with the pitch and their budget was a fraction of what it needed to be. (Not our first low budget rodeo…) On top of that the shopping centre was only 41% leased and we were launching it in the middle of a recession.

Built on the site of the original Woodwards Department Store in BC’s oldest city, New Westminster, Woodward Place had a very small primary trade area. As well it was only a 15 minute drive to BC’s largest shopping centre, Metropolis at Metrotown so it certainly could not compete on variety of shops. So we opted to instill civic pride to get the people of New West to shop local.

Our strategy was to set the mall apart by capitalizing on residents’ strong connection to local history and community pride. At the core of our campaign was the tag line: “Bringing it all Back Home” which appeared on all ads and collateral. To allow for more media placement we kept ad costs low by pairing headlines with funny twists and historical prints from the New Westminster Museum & Archives. We even spun off a contest to see if we could find out who the grumpy family was in one of our ads.

Opening day had us on tender hooks until we saw that there was a lineup of people around the block to get into the mall! The 4,000 canvas shopping bags we had slated for distribution over 2 days were given away in the first hour and we generated $15,000 in free publicity (which in 1988 was 50% deposit on on a condo). Over the 4 day opening, sales totalled $525 per square foot (excluding the three anchors which had opened a year earlier). Woodwards and Woodwynn experienced over a 95% increase in sales y/y.

A year after the opening, a customer intercept survey showed that consumer recall of the campaign was 77%.