A Cathay Pacific airplane landed in British Columbia’s Richmond Centre Mall last week, giving young shoppers a place to burn some steam. And according to Leslie Matheson, marketing director at Richmond Centre, the mall will be looking at adding more branded playgrounds targeting an older kid demo in the near future.
‘We’re looking at more of a computer and technology-based area, [rather] than an actual play area. But we’d still want to call it a children’s energy burning area. So we’re still trying to figure out something for children over five that would still stimulate them and be interesting to them,’ she says.
For the Cathay Pacific brand hookup, Matheson says an airplane playground was chosen because the mall is so close to the Vancouver International Airport — an employer of around 30,000 people in the area. ‘When we decided to go with the plane, we looked at companies that matched our brand and were after what we were going for,’ she says. As such, the mall chose Cathay Pacific for its family-focused, neighbourly brand attributes. Another reason for the Cathay Pacific choice, says Matheson, was because both the mall and airport have a high Asian demographic, at 45%. Richmond Centre has traffic counts of up to 12.5 million each year.
