The entries give some wonderful ideas for what you can offer in your Love Your Local Market events, for either a day or the whole fortnight and indeed throughout the year to build affection for your local market and work effectively with partners in your town centres and villages.

You can find case studies for the best entries this year at the bottom of this page but we are delighted to announce that once again, Warrington Market has won the accolade in 2016. It's obvious to see why.

A six day per week indoor market in Warrington town centre operated by Warrington Borough Council. Over 200 indoor stalls usually occupied by over 120 small businesses, but currently sustaining approximately 75 traders during a period of a major redevelopment. General footfall has declined during the last 12 months due to the adjacent building works taking place with members of the public perceiving the market has closed.
Future plans for the market in Warrington look very promising and during this period of redevelopment it is important to nurture new and interesting talent that will help keep the market attractive to customers and sustainable into the future.

Warrington aimed to utilise the LYLM campaign to deliver a clear message to customers about the major redevelopment works taking place adjacent to the market building, the message needed to shout that the market remains open for business as usual.

Our main aims and objectives for the two week campaign were:

Funding for promoting the LYLM campaign in 2014 was achieved through a grant from the government town centre innovation funding and resulted in market events animating the town centre streets. In 2015 this source of funding was not available. However, due to previous successes the Council managed to generate promotional funding from existing budgets allocated for regenerating the town centre streets and as part of the redevelopment works. Expenditure from the existing market operational budget was not required for the two week campaign.

The challenge was to provide a full programme of events to cover each day between 13-27 May utilising two major town centre one day market events and lots of incidental low cost market promotions in between. The two large market events were held on the Saturdays during the campaign. These were:

Comic Convention - Sat 16 May. A new innovative event to attract a younger demographic
Warrington Food Festival - Sat 23 May. A town centre street market with over 100 stalls.

Other events included:
Guided History Tours - Wed 13, 20 & 27 May. Television presenter Mark Olly took groups of customers on a tour of the indoor market and behind the scenes service areas telling stories from the past and present. These were very popular and were held each Wednesday during the campaign.
1920’s Karaoke – Tues 26 & Wed 27 May. To help raise awareness of Dementia week in UK we hired a Pianola which entertained customers in the open café areas. This activity lead to developing links with the local older people’s forum and helped stimulate further events in the year.
History Exhibitions – 13 – 27 May. A selection of photographs from years gone by supplied from local history enthusiasts. These were so popular with customers that they have remained on display in the market since.
Radio Warrington – 13-27 May. The local community radio station held special programmes dedicated to the LYLM campaign throughout the period and broadcast live from the market each day interviewing traders.
Special Customer Offers – A number of the indoor traders made special offers to customers linked to LYLM and ran their own free prize draw competitions
Mix n Mingle Entertainers – A variety of Children’s entertainers were used in the second week of the campaign during school holidays, to enhance the atmosphere and deliver a surprise element to the shopping experience.

Use of Social media
I have always acknowledged that social media can be a powerful promotional tool and have ensured that Warrington market regularly uses facebook and twitter in all activities. This year in particular, many of our individual traders have started to do likewise and that has increased our exposure.
The introduction of a Comic Convention event during LYLM as a way of attracting younger customers was an excellent opportunity to focus on social media as a main promotional tool. The results exceeded all our expectations. To be honest…. It left us a little shell-shocked at just how powerful social media can be when harnessed correctly.
The majority of advertising for the Comic-Con was carried out on facebook and twitter, plus a short television campaign on the three days before the event.
We started the Comic Con promotion a few weeks in advance by releasing a short video on you-tube featuring one of our butchers in a spacesuit. This quirky approach created a lot of initial interest. It also generated some negative publicity from an element of “serious” comic con fans who doubted that an indoor market could ever be a credible venue for such an event. These doubters soon changed their minds though as we introduced a steady stream of posts on social media promoting what activities were taking place.

Fortunately, we secured some key anchor attractions including a replica life size X-Wing fighter jet from Star Wars, which film fans could actually sit inside.
This was the first outing for the replica X-Wing in this country and the announcement we were seeing it first at Warrington market generated lots of interest over the internet from right across the UK.
Within a short period we had the attention of many people interested in attending. So from this point on, each time we posted another attraction it seemed to increase the level of excitement.
One of our ex traders from the market is a specialist wholesale comic distributer that has become very successful on an international scale. We managed a partnership arrangement with his company and offer free comics to anyone attending the Warrington event in “cosplay”. (Serious fancy dress)
Both local and regional press had noticed the activities online and they approached us for radio and press interviews for editorial features.
About one week prior to the event it was clear we had generated a lot of interest with the public. Many other web sites were discussing the event and there was a considerable demand from external traders and entertainers wishing to take part in the event.
At this stage I became a little concerned about how many people were going to attend the event and we introduced measures to design the spread of activity and foot-flow across the town centre.
Additional doormen were engaged for the indoor market to ensure that if too many people entered the market we would be able to restrict entry and keep to safe levels.
Extra fairground rides were allowed to pitch in the town centre streets to help encourage and spread the potential crowds.
Ironically, the local Warrington Guardian published a story two days before the event on Thursday 14 May dedicating a full page to some of our negative traders who were complaining that the market had no footfall and was suffering because no one came to the market anymore.
Our predictions about how much interest the event had generated were proved right when on Friday 15 May, the day before the event, Chris Evans was talking about it on his BBC Radio 2 Breakfast show. We had not fed this story to him, but they had obviously noticed all the social media activity.
Saturday 16 May the market was the busiest it had ever been since opening in 1974, and a couple of cafes in the town centre streets were reporting they had sold out by early afternoon not realising how busy this event was going to be. The Comic Con turned out to be different than other major street markets that we are used to organising due to the increased “dwell time” from people attending.
Feedback from the event was 100% positive, including lots of post editorial and pictures in the local press, plus this email from the Chair of the Market Trader Association…

When arranging the programme of activities we were conscious to maintain focus on what our LYLM campaign is trying to achieve, ie promote our indoor market and the products inside it.
After arranging so much activity, we wanted to avoid the potential for traders to say,
“…but what have the romans ever done for us?”
Therefore, utilising the two week campaign as a platform for promoting the indoor market we produced in partnership with the local Warrington Guardian an 8 Page LYLM magazines distributed to 40,000 local residents
Each trader got a free advertisement and was encouraged to make a special offer for the LYLM period.
The mag was also a way of promoting the programme of events and activities
In addition to the magazine, the Council also awarded a two week rent free period to all traders as a good-will gesture in support of the campaign.
Feedback and Future
The Comic Con event in particular opened a whole new area for special events that attract large footfall with particular emphasis on youth.
Local press dedicated several pages to photographs of the events. The local Warrington worldwide magazine informed me they had their busiest internet usage in years during the days after the comic con event.
Following the success of the social media advertising for the Comic Con we ran another similar style event in October as a spin-off event celebrating the 30 year anniversary of the “Back to the Future” films. This was promoted purely via social media and the result was another well attended event attracting lots of publicity for the market in both local and regional media.
The LYLM campaign helped us develop links with the “Older Peoples Forum” in Warrington and consequently led to a number of lectures about market history being delivered to various neighbourhood groups. This generated a lot of local interest in the market and we became the main feature in the “National Older Peoples Day Celebrations” in October taking place in Warrington.