Client: MINISTRY OF HOUSING, COMMUNITIES & LOCAL GOvernment / nabma

Project: Impact Evaluation of ‘Love Your Local Market’ 

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What were MAKE asked to do?

Working with the best retail market researchers in the business, ROI Team, we were asked by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government and the National Association of British Market Authorities to evaluate the success of their Love Your Local Market project. The LYLM project was borne out of Mary Portas’ recommendations to then Prime Minister David Cameron about how to revitalise the High Street. Promoting British market culture and their unique, exciting and outstanding value of was a key Portas recommendation. 

How did MAKE do it?

  • LYLM featured national campaigns to drive footfall to markets, radio advertising, specialist press, ministerial launches, and the coordination of two weeks of action by local market operators across the UK. Our job was to work out if it worked!

  • The ROI-MAKE team undertook a range of research projects to understand how many towns and cities had taken up LYLM and promoted it locally, what increase there had been in footfall locally, any upswing in takings for traders and how local people had heard about it.

  • ROI-MAKE team’s research approach included speaking to hundreds of market traders in over 20 locations. We travelled the country from well known mega markets like Portobello in Notting Hill to small regional operations such as Shipley, West Yorkshire. We combined this with online and telephone surveys to over 400 UK market operators (private and council) gauging local impact. We also accessed electronic footfall measurement during the campaign to measure upswing.

  • ROI-MAKE produced a report that featured the most illuminating insights into retail markets in the history of the sector. It was clear that LYLM was a great success, but there was still much that could be improved. We told the government and NABMA how to do LYLM better next year. 

What happened next?

The Government and NABMA grew LYLM and it is now a firmly established annual event with a national coordinator. The programme has driven a 20% increase in footfall to markets during the LYLM weeks and built new relationships with more aspirational consumer groups. 

What unique value did MAKE bring to this project?

Because we run night markets ourselves, we brought the ‘operator’s perspective’ to designing the research process. In particular, our expertise helped us gain data on finances from market traders who are notoriously difficult to extract this information from.