Ever been to a shopping mall where a cleaner in the food court actually smiles and thanks you for your patronage?

How about exhaustedly heading for your car during the Christmas frenzy, suddenly being handed a free, energy-boosting chocolate bar and then getting a lift in a golf cart from a cheerful, carol-singing ‘Rudolph Ranger?’

Sounds like fantasy, but it’s actually happening at Richmond Centre in Richmond, B.C., thanks to its marketing director, Leslie Matheson, and what she insists is a lot of help from her collegial friends.

These welcoming touches are producing 15 million visits a year on a relatively miniscule annual marketing budget of $1.7 million. During Matheson’s nine-year tenure at Richmond Centre (co-owned by Cadillac Fairview and Ivanhoe Cambridge), sales have risen from $383 to $521 per square foot, with a corresponding sales volume increase of over $40 million.

And Matheson et al have no plans to stop improving things. Set to launch in time for the 2005 holiday season, the mall’s new ‘theme areas’ will include a space where, instead of nagging their spouses to stop shopping, bored men can lounge in comfort and watch sports on big TVs.

Three other areas will include an Asian-themed centre, a teen-oriented centre and an area for showcasing community happenings.

‘In the past,’ Matheson points out, ‘the marketing director in the shopping centre traditionally wouldn’t have been involved in these sorts of initiatives. But in our case, they are all on-brand and I’m the designated brand champion, so I’m spearheading getting approval [for them] from senior management.’

Certainly getting that approval must be getting easier, since Matheson, 40, and her inside team and outside agency partners have successfully reinvented the public face and popular perception of Richmond Centre in the last two years.

It’s hard to imagine a tougher marketing task than they faced at the time: trying to successfully brand an entity comprised of not one but two adjacent shopping malls with 240 retailers, each touting its own identity. Not to mention doing it enticingly enough to draw both halves of a bicultural local population comprised of supposedly never-the-twain-shall-meet Asians and Caucasians.

As a partner at Calgary’s Provoke agency, Philip Coppard worked closely with Matheson on the comprehensive branding campaign that transformed the centre from a traditionally tactical – let’s get Santa in and hope everybody comes – venue to a strategically sophisticated retail winner.

‘We studied people’s relationships with Richmond Centre, did an economic analysis of their trade area and then made some recommendations about what the brand really is and how to move it forward,’ Coppard explains.

‘What’s really impressed us is that Leslie did, and still does, more with what we came back with than almost anyone else we’ve ever worked with. She champions the brand the way that every client is told they need to, but you rarely, rarely, rarely see.’

Just one example of how Matheson routinely goes the extra mile, says Coppard, is that ‘she actually went to the Cannes advertising festival because she loves good creative work so much that she wants to see what the rest of the world is doing. That kind of professionalism on the part of a shopping centre marketing person is just amazing.’

Alan Russell, creative director in the Vancouver office of Richmond Centre’s AOR, DDB Canada, echoes Coppard. ‘A lot of mall marketing is banal and predictable,’ he explains. ‘But because Leslie has a real appreciation for the consumer’s point of view, she’s completely open to the more conceptual strategies we’ve proposed.’

Russell says that the current ‘Happy Hunting at Richmond Centre’ campaign is a case in point. ‘It’s all about the consumer insight that shopping has a parallel with [sport] hunting in that people are always looking for the exact right thing and then boasting about it afterwards.

‘When Leslie sees an idea like that, she also sees the potential for pushing it that extra bit further by taking it into the mall to make it a fully integrated campaign.’ Hence, the centre’s 2004 holiday card, which was sent to shoppers and depicted a delighted woman displaying a string of purses as if they were fish.

So what was the essence of the rebranding solution to all of the mall’s challenges?

Matheson says it boiled down to finding a single through-line – for which the act of shopping itself was chosen – and then a single inclusive customer focus, which is families. According to solid follow-up data, blending those two elements with generous helpings of fun, community relevance and surprises has produced an appealing and memorable personality as the overall brand.

Matheson says her approach – which includes routinely ignoring her phone and e-mail for a few hours so she can wander around the centre chatting with shoppers and retailers – springs from her belief that ‘marketing shouldn’t just be about advertising and PR.’

Which brings us back to that chocolate bar/golf cart thing. Matheson says the candy was a casual promotion with Cadbury’s that’s now being parlayed into offers to other CPG companies with the goal of producing not just goodwill among shoppers, but a tidy profit to boot. Introduced two Christmases ago (with help from Vancouver agency Inventa), the initiative has won an award from the International Council of Shopping Centres.

What about the smiling cleaner? Coppard says it’s another example of Matheson’s uncommon insight. When pitching the new branding plan to the troops at the centre, she included everyone right down to contract cleaners, who sat cheek by jowl with 240 retail biggies. ‘Only Leslie would have thought of inviting absolutely everyone who could possibly have an impact on turning the centre around,’ says Coppard. ‘And then she rallied the entire organization to get behind the brand to a degree that was just incredible.’