WORCESTER’S Crowngate Shopping Centre has won a prestigious award for its BookBench Competition and Exhibition last year.
In a ceremony at The Brewery in London, the city shopping centre was recognised as Merit Winner within the ‘Cause Related Marketing’ Category of the British Council of Shopping Centres (BCSC) Purple Apple Marketing Awards for effective shopping and town centre marketing within the UK retail property sector.
Launched on World Book Day, the CrownGate BookBench Competition and Exhibition encouraged children to draw their interpretations of their favourite stories and from 302 entries, nine designs were selected to decorate life-size 3D benches, shaped as open books that were displayed in the centre as an exhibition.
Designed and created by Wild in Art’s Creative Director Chris Wilkinson, the BookBench proved to be the perfect canvas through which to unite visual art and reading for enjoyment. CrownGate took this concept and decided to run a competition with local schools, colleges and universities.
Sara Matthews, Marketing Manager for CrownGate was presented with the Purple Apple Award by BBC Radio 1’s Edith Bowman, in recognition of the campaign.
She said: “I am one of those lucky individuals who loves my job, but to have a new initiative I introduced to the centre recognised with a national marketing award is phenomenal. It makes all the hard work completely worthwhile.
“Huge thanks has to go to all the schools across Worcestershire who took part in the BookBench Competition and brought my idea to life. Having only been at CrownGate for 2 years, I hope this will be the first of many awards for the Team and I”.
Partnering with The Hive and local schools, colleges and universities, the judges said: “There was good interaction with the institutions and local partnerships and good implementation across the centre and then out into the local community. This was well run and real ‘feel good’ promotion with a clear pathway from concept to delivery and the legacy of the actual benches for years to come.”
The BookBench Exhibition will commence on Saturday, July 2 and run for nine weeks. In addition to planned activities throughout the exhibition, there will also be a display of all the entries received for the design competition, from all the schools.
To find out more about the BookBench Competition and Exhibition visit http://crowngate-worcester.co.uk/bookbench2016/
