New managing agents were in place and they were on a mission to revive the asset while protecting retail sales volumes. In simple terms, this meant that marketing had to simultaneously put a stop to the music-hall jokes while attracting new customers and new retailers.
To us, this meant a strategy of injecting fresh pride in the product and reawakening the curiosity of the 600,000 customers who live on the doorstep and who happen to be some of the most affluent and discerning in the whole of the UK.
We did this category by category, communicating range and availability through lifestyle press and various direct channels. We also revolutionised the website into a magazine format delivering over a million hits a month and a rapidly swelling database of eager, well-healed and opted-in Londoners. That meant that we could spread the good news of new retailers, new restaurants and the whole innovation story at virtually no cost.
And, we need to because everything was achieved while the tenants' service charge was being cut.
Recently, the managing agents fell victim to the recession so that was the end of that. Well, not quite; the customer profile has been successfully migrated, every category we tackled showed an uplift and every launch we marketed was judged to be a success. And, we have a similar track record on four of their other assets.
Proof that you need more than luck to deliver extraordinary results in extraordinary times.
