Situation:
Pike Place Market is known by many Seattle area residents for its fresh produce and fish. However, locals had recently begun staying away during summer months to avoid tourists, who come for the market’s proximity to the Puget sound, the restaurants and a full schedule of events.
After building up the market’s outdoor farm stands so locals wouldn’t have to go inside, the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority needed a way to raise awareness of the street activities while also reminding locals Pike Place was Seattle’s first farmer’s market.
Approach:
With a budget of $21,000, agency HL2 created a folded mailer that borrowed the look and feel of old-fashioned farm crates and highlighted Organic Wednesdays, Farm Fridays and Summer Sundays, when farmers sell their produce on the street. The piece included a $5 coupon good towards farm table purchases made on those days.
There were two drops of 17,500 mailers each, the first on June 4 and the second on July 25. In order to get a sense of where local shoppers hail from, the mailings went to different sets of names within a 1 mile radius of the market and from the broader Puget Sound area. Local businesses were also given mailers to hand out, bringing the campaign’s total print run up to 47,500.
Results:
The redemption rate for the coupon is between 4% and 5%.
“Sundays now pop on the street,” said James Haydu, director of marketing and communications, Pike Place Market PDA. “Sundays have become a farmer’s market day for people in every city and our enhanced outreach has made this true for us, too,” he continued.
