Pennells Garden Centre

A few years ago, the Lincoln branch of Pennells Garden Centre underwent a major refurbishment across the whole site. This included incorporating a brand new foodhall, creating a huge fully covered plant area and expanding the restaurant capacity.

The Foodhall promotes high quality Lincolnshire and regional produce and includes the award winning Gary Simpson Butchers. The fully covered plant area massively increased the square footage of the garden centre. This allowed them to showcase a fantastic range of trees, plants and shrubs. That also increased the  restaurant seating capacity to over 400.

Having made this investment, Pennells Garden Centre wanted to promote the centre as a great place to visit. It was important to not only promote it in and around Lincoln, but also to the wider region. The client also has a smaller garden centre near Cleethorpes, so this needed to be taken into account.

We had already worked with Pennells before by producing their new website. We put a marketing plan together to help promote the Centre. Having looked at both billboards and bus advertising to do this. Billboards offered great visibility, but sites were restricted path the time in and around Lincoln at the time they needed them was restricted. It was for this reason we went for a bus rear campaign backed up by a 40,000 leaflet drop.

The Campaign

The bus campaign comprised of 28 bus rears over a 4 week period around the two May Bank Holidays. We planned buses to go out of the Lincoln and Grantham depots. This covered all the main conurbations in Lincolnshire and also into Newark. Maximising visibility in towns and villages in the region. This was really important as it would capture people commuting to and from work and also locals in the towns and villages.

The creative used was simple but highly visual. It highlighted the refurbishment and also gave reasons why people should visit such as the concessions within it and the restaurant capacity.

We also organised the 40,000 leaflet drop to Pennells existing database from their Lincoln and Grimsby centres and also through the Lincolnshire Echo and Grimsby Telegraph.

The timing and the nature of the campaign proved to be a success as footfall increased throughout May and has continued ever since.