Over a six month period, BBS worked with the development team for a new retail centre in Yamanto, west of Brisbane, with the task of supporting the leasing team to drive interest and ultimately secure leases to allow the project to move beyond concept and into construction.

This program was delivered in a low-confidence retail environment and with the added challenge of having most primary leasing decision-makers based interstate and with limited or misaligned knowledge of the Yamanto region.

While retail leasing is not traditionally an environment for community engagement processes, BBS chose to deploy a strategy which brought the community into the process, as a mechanism for demonstrating demand for particular types of tenants in the new centre. The leasing team was then able to use this demonstrated demand in their pitch to tenant representatives.

One specific campaign for community participation was designed around food and beverage tenancies with a dedicated ‘Bring the Burger’ campaign. This was done through media coverage, social media and supported by digital advertising, including:

• Social media campaign via the centre’s dedicated Facebook page encouraging residents to tag their favourite burger operator
• ‘What’s in a burger’ hashtag initiative with polarising questions ie ‘does beetroot belong on a burger?’ designed to generate interest via likes, comments and shares

The campaign generated a spike in page engagement with 90,280 engaged unique users and a spike in page followers. This engagement generated hype in the local community and was used by the leasing team to demonstrate the demand in the local catchment for a quality burger operator. As at May 2020, tenants had been secured for 75% of the centre GLA.