£1m Christmas ads to take on Glasgow in fight for shoppers

Published on Wednesday 8 April 2009 09:59

EDINBURGH is to launch a £1 million fightback against Glasgow stealing shoppers and visitors from the Capital.

The new body set up to promote Edinburgh is set to mount a major Christmas campaign, followed by a bid to attract culturally savvy visitors to the city.

They are the first initiatives of the new Destination Edinburgh Marketing Alliance (DEMA) and come after the Glasgow City Marketing Bureau targeted Edinburgh shoppers last Christmas in a 270,000 campaign to increase trade.

The Christmas campaign will mainly see Edinburgh's "festive experience" promoted to visitors from Scotland and the rest of the UK. It will combine marketing of the Winter Festivals with promotion of the retail, food and leisure on offer in the city to try to encourage more shoppers to visit Edinburgh for a short shopping break.

The drive will be followed up by a second campaign to bring visitors to the city in the period after New Year until March.

The Boutique Edinburgh scheme is to target international city break visitors by promoting Edinburgh's restaurants, bars, hotels, museums and galleries.

Kenneth Wardrop, DEMA's project director, said: "Edinburgh is a leisure retail experience so it is that combination of the cultural side, events side, eating/drinking side and the shopping that is important to present. It is a broad experience of a leisure day out in the city where you can combine shopping with other activities."

The Christmas campaign is likely to start from October and will see DEMA work with key groups like Essential Edinburgh, hotels and businesses to promote the city.

As well as media and poster advertising, DEMA also intends to use social networking sites such as Facebook and Flickr to promote the city.

Final budgets for this year's Edinburgh Christmas campaign are not confirmed, but Mr Wardrop said that he hoped it would be of a similar scale to Glasgow's last year.

Marketing of the Boutique Edinburgh campaign is also be expected to get under way later this year but a more international market would be targeted than the Christmas drive.

Councillor Tom Buchanan, the city's economic development leader, said Edinburgh Airport and individual airlines had both indicated that they wanted more promotion of the off-peak January-March period.

He also said: "A campaign like this will also bring in additional revenues for hoteliers and retailers at a difficult time of the year."