PR Efforts Can Have Outsized Impact
We’ve worked with St. Vital Centre for several years now helping it with proactive public relations efforts as well as crisis communications when the need arises.
St. Vital Centre is one of the premier shopping centres in this part of the country. They have built a reputation as being a major community gathering space for the city. They’re committed to making sure the community knows what’s going on at the shopping centre.
The retail game is always changing. Tenants will come and go. When Sears Canada shut down a couple of years ago, it left big spaces to fill in malls across the country. St. Vital Centre was no exception and the mall has been hard at work reimagining the old Sears space.
We were happy to help them announce some new tenants were going to be filling part of the old Sears space on the north side of the mall.We developed a news release and sent it out to a targeted list of local reporters and media outlets. Prior to the release, we met with the client to review and discuss key messages and potential responses to anticipated questions.
The release let reporters know that HomeSense and Marshalls were about to move into the old Sears space, alongside GoodLife Fitness. We expect the shopping centre will have more tenants to announce in the months ahead.
We also used this opportunity to let the community know that Dynacare (also a client of ours) had opened its new laboratory and health services centre. Dynacare selected St. Vital Centre as one of four new supersites in Winnipeg. St. Vital Centre is ideal because it’s so easily accessed by car, bus and bike. It also offers extra convenience for people coming for a medical test, because they can use the other amenities and services in the mall (or just get some extra errands done).
We’re pleased to report that our efforts secured excellent media coverage, all of which helped reinforce St. Vital Centre’s brand as a major shopping centre and gathering point in the community. We helped coordinate interviews and also secured a prominent photo opportunity in the Winnipeg Free Press.
People tend to give news reports a lot more credibility than advertising or sponsored posts. We tend to consume news sources that we trust. When we read, hear or view a story from our favourite news source, we tend to believe it. If it has impact on our lives, we also share it.
Here are a few of the stories that were generated as a result of our efforts.
