In a retail landscape where Mother’s Day often still means a handful of pink flowers, and Easter is represented by a well-worn bunny, Grand Arcade in Cambridge is doing things very differently.

The upmarket city centre shopping destination has built a marketing strategy that is as distinctive as Cambridge itself: intellectually led, community-rooted, and focused on quality over volume.

Spearheading that strategy is Julie Kervadec, Grand Arcade’s marketing manager, who has spent the past six years developing an approach that treats the centre’s diverse audience with the gravity it deserves.

“We’ve obviously seen a shift in shopping habits after the pandemic,” says Julie. “Part of the strategy has really been to create experiential shopping: to make sure we give an extra reason for people to visit us.”

In Cambridge, that means navigating a complex audience: economic polarisation, loyal local residents, a significant tourist influx each summer, and a student population that swells the city from 85,000 to around 120,000 during term time.

The shift in strategy post-pandemic was deliberate. Rather than filling the calendar with a succession of one-day activations, Grand Arcade moved towards fewer, larger campaigns; each one built around a 360-degree approach that extends across digital, on-site, and press channels.

“Pre-pandemic, the centre used to have a lot more one-day events, and those events weren’t necessarily supported by a digital campaign,” explains Julie. “We’ve done a lot of work to do very 360-degree, cross-channel campaigns. And when they include a physical event on site, we make it last longer, and we make it bigger, so there is really this wow impact; and we also get more for the money we’re spending.”

The centre’s Jurassic Arcade dinosaur trail for Easter 2025, which featured animatronics, local school art, various competitions, and low-cost (£4pp) workshops for families, drew over 700,000 visitors in just three weeks, generating a 3% year-on-year uplift in footfall during the school break, and a 9% increase in centre turnover year-on-year. There was also a boost for campaign partner, the University’s Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, whose Head Professor of Palaeontology had written all the educational material.

Meanwhile, its Lego-focused endangered species trail, which ran for 17 days in partnership with Cambridge University’s Museum of Zoology, attracted 650,000 visitors with a 7% footfall increase, and 8% rise in turnover.

What sets Grand Arcade’s events apart is the depth of content behind them, and the partnerships that give them credibility. The centre has cultivated strong relationships with Cambridge’s extraordinary network of academic and cultural institutions, from the University Museum of Zoology, to the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy.

“For every campaign, we try to have an entertainment element as well as an educative and cultural element,” says Julie. “When we did the Lego trail, we built content with Cambridge University – we created posters with very precise facts written by academics, and a trail map with all sorts of information that people liked to collect. We strive to go a step further in the content we deliver around the activation.”

The Grand Discoveries campaign, which began in 2023, and runs every two years, highlights scientific innovations from Cambridge, in partnership with top science institutions and companies. “We designed this campaign and exhibition from scratch, including an award-winning 25-metre-long DNA helix sculpture,” says Julie.

This philosophy of authentic local collaboration extends to the centre’s work with Cambridge BID, local hotels, and a growing network of independent businesses and charities – relationships that Julie describes as delivering “a lot of value while being cost-efficient for all parties involved. Partnering with neighbours is a powerful way to increase a campaign impact for everyone involved.”

Grand Arcade’s events programme is carefully constructed around its three core audiences. The Easter campaign targets families and tourists: this year, a landmark Disney The Lion King exhibition, celebrating 25 years of the West End musical, brings the show’s iconic masks, puppets, and costumes to the centre, running from 23rd March to 19th April. The summer programme caters to the tourist season with ambitious large-scale exhibitions, while autumn brings the annual Student Night, timed to coincide with freshers’ fairs at both Cambridge University and Anglia Ruskin University.

The centre’s most distinctive recurring campaign, Let’s Go Circular, was launched in 2022. It was the first shopping centre initiative of its kind focused on the circular economy, and uses Grand Arcade’s footfall as a platform to educate and engage visitors on sustainability. Now in its fifth year, the campaign has involved over 60 organisations, 80+ activations, and 840 hours of interactive content, and has won four awards.

“The idea is to use our much-visited place as a platform to share, connect and learn about the circular economy,” says Julie. This year, Let’s Go Circular will step into the spotlight for a special 16-day experience, including live beekeeping demonstrations, interactive exhibits, and repair workshops.

The Cambridge Wedding Fair, now in its fifth year, is another example of Grand Arcade’s talent for productive local partnerships. Co-organised with the University Arms – the city’s most prestigious hotel – the fair takes place in the hotel’s grand ballroom, giving the centre’s premium retail brands a highly relevant, useful, and curated setting in which to engage directly with customers.

The centre is also careful not to exhaust its most successful formats. “We really don’t like to do the same thing every year,” Julie explains. Popular events like Jurassic Arcade are deliberately run only every two years to preserve their impact, and even long-running campaigns like Let’s Go Circular are regularly refreshed in format and timing.

Rainbow Runway – the centre’s annual Pride event, which in 2025 drew 300 guests to a ticketed evening fashion show featuring 18 retailers, and 40 artists, raising funds for Cambridge Pride charity – is sitting out 2026 entirely, with a view to returning bigger in 2027.

It’s a conscious decision, and one that reflects a clear-eyed understanding of how audiences relate to recurring events. “There is an element of expectation,” says Julie. “When it’s like, ‘oh, they’ll be doing that again’ – it’s hard to make it new and exciting and inventive every year. By not doing it for a year, it gives people the opportunity to come back and support it more next time.”

The strategic thinking extends well beyond events. When a new retailer joins Grand Arcade, the marketing team is on hand to deliver a comprehensive, multi-channel opening campaign.

The launch of Townhouse Nail Salon illustrates the approach. From the moment the store signed its lease, Grand Arcade was active: running pre-opening Instagram competitions, creating bespoke video content, placing solus newsletters to over 42,000 subscribers, running Meta and Google ad campaigns, and securing an advertorial in local premium title Velvet Magazine. The Townhouse logo featured in the Rainbow Runway pride event campaign months before the store even opened, and the brand had a stand at both Cambridge freshers’ fairs, reaching over 30,000 students.

“We often deliver complete campaigns for retailers opening at Grand Arcade,” says Julie. “We don’t just do something for their opening day; we have the pre-opening campaign, then the opening day itself, and then we make sure that in the months after the opening we continue to shout about them.”

With 12 million annual visitors, a newsletter list of 55,000 subscribers, and a LinkedIn engagement rate of 20%, Grand Arcade’s marketing is clearly performing. But the real measure of success goes beyond numbers: a thriving shopping centre that its community genuinely cares about, anchored by campaigns that reflect the intelligence and curiosity of the city it serves.