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Celebrity sightings took on a completely different meaning this past fall at London's Covent Garden. Stars from the stage and the screen were seen serving in stores throughout the popular market, delivering live performances from a well-crafted plot.

Totally Covent Garden Week, as the event was called, was one stop on the Totally London Tour, which Visit London ran as part of a £6M campaign to promote the English capital to Londoners and the UK's domestic market. The aim was to reinstate the relevance of the market to Londoners in line with the marketing strategy.

The Week featured highlights from the best of Covent Garden’s event programme, with live music, dancing, food and fashion. This was then supplemented with keynote events such as Celebrity Shop Assistance, which saw 40 stars of the theatre and screen serving in stores, and casts of West End shows performing on stage.  A hunt for London’s best busker, an orchestral "conductathon," children's events linked to the Theatre and Transport Museums, and a classic car show all added to the excitement of the Covent Garden experience. A live appearance by the stars of BBC’s Fame Academy also gave the event a national TV profile.

While the lineup was sure to be a crowd-pleaser, financing the event was not as easy, especially given that most of the market's budget for 2003 was already allocated to other initiatives, such as Music in the Market. But Nelson Bakewell, managed to do it by negotiating additional funding for the promotion via the GLA.

This financial backing took the form of a direct grant (£50,000), specific Covent Garden advertising (£23,000), a pro-rata share of PR support (£11,000), merchandising and distribution teams (£5,250) and research/evaluation (£9,300), for a total of £98,550. Meanwhile, Covent Garden Market’s own costs totalled £13,000.

The market's event was advertised within the Totally London Tour's creative format. There was mailing distribution at London tube stations, fliering teams across other shopping locations, two door-drops of The Londoner to every household in London and specific ads in Metro, The Evening Standard and in The Daily Express. There was also a specific Totally Covent Garden Week flier.

All this exposure quickly moved consumers to action. Covent Garden tenants, such as Malini and Lush, reported sales increases of up to 20 percent on specific days, while the  Apple Market posted a record sales performance for the year on Sunday, September 14. That day also saw record footfall and a discernibly different clientele with a clear swing toward a family-oriented London customer.

Other peaks were recorded during the Celebrity Shop Assistance event—it produced a 60 percent increase in footfall—and the busker competition. Anecdotally, restaurants such as Fuel offered to double their charity donation as they had such a positive response to their celebrity event.

The only negatives resulted from sound levels during a number of stage events, as well as the amount of management time required to condense such a full range of activities into such a short time frame. But the efforts paid off, in both sales and notoriety.

Media exposure for Totally Covent Garden included prime time coverage of Fame Academy on BBC1 on Saturday, September 13, features on BBC London, LBC, What’s On in London, West End Extra and in The Daily Telegraph and The Times, plus regular updates in Metro. Trade press, particularly Retail Week, also covered the event.