Explain How Sport and Leisure Can Be Used as a Catalyst for Rebranding

Explain how sport and leisure can be used as a catalyst for rebranding (10 marks)

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Rebranding is a strategy to try and make an area look more appealing to bring new businesses, homeowners and overall try to improve the area economically.

 One area that has been rebranded through leisure is Bristol. Bristol was a rundown and outdated area. Lots of shops has shutdown due to the lack of shoppers so there wasn’t a lot of money being brought into the area. Bristol has also suffered from decentralisation or the donut effect. Decentralisation is where offices, shops and other leisure activities are built on the edge of a city, leaving the city centre redundant and eventually rundown. They relocate because of often cheaper land, easier parking, more space to develop and it was often easier to get there. Cribs causeway is an example of a large scale shopping centre moving out of the centre of Bristol. Many of the shops within the city centre could not compete with cribs causeway therefore had to close down. Also, other leisure facilities started to set up on the city outskirts.

To improve this rundown and outdated image they decided to invest in building a new £500 million development project. They built Cabot Circus, a 1 million square foot shopping centre on the old broad mead site. This area included a lot of new high end shops (e.g. Harvey Nicholls), they also built 270 city centre homes with a 2,600 space car park so parking does not become a problem. Alongside this they attracted 160 company headquarters bring trade to the area and creating a lot of new jobs.

The project was fairly successful. To make sure that they managed to give as many jobs to local people as possible they set up courses to make the people more skilled. It also drew people into the area; they did this through the shops they offered, mostly the high end shops. Also the whole area looked a lot better than it did before the rebranding, it now looks a lot more modern and no longer rundown. Though, the rebranding did have many problems to it as well. Firstly, they where no reasonably priced food shops fir locals, they often had to travel outside of the city centre to get food shopping. Secondly, the people who lived there before have seen a change of landscape which they did not like. The residents of St. Judes now over look a hotel car park instead of a view of the city. Even after the rebranding there are still areas that are dead in the new shopping centre, the top floor has been nicknamed dead man’s alley due to the lack of visitors and shops having to shutdown. A lot of these businesses were dragged into long leases too meaning if they are not open they still pay some rent. This has resulted empty units still being a problem. It was also still hard for locals to get the new jobs and people from outside the city who are more skilled than them would take the higher paid jobs, leaving low pain unskilled jobs for the locals.