Ten Years of Bolstering KOP’s Profile

Since day one, King of Prussia District remains committed to keeping KOP in the spotlight and bolstering its reputation through our robust Marketing & Communications Program. While our commitment has never wavered, our campaigns and events certainly have evolved over the past decade! Join us on a walk down Memory Lane…

How it Started

When King of Prussia Business Improvement District was founded in 2010, our initial challenge was branding our organization so we could begin to tell the story of King of Prussia. We sought help from Lorel Marketing to design our logo and website and launched our new brand that same year. One of our first initiatives was the IM KOP campaign in 2013, which highlighted KOP’s business community and leisure travelers. The campaign included billboard, print and web ads, as well as ads on hotel key cards and window decals for KOP businesses. In 2014, we introduced KOPerks, an opt-in program that featured deals from KOP retailers and restaurants. We launched a mobile app and sent out regular emails to our sign-up list of a few hundred people.

We also debuted events in those first years, some of which have been retired, like our Rock Your Lunch Summer Concert Series, and some we still hold to this day, including our signature event KOP Beerfest Royale  (coming up October 7 & 9, get your tickets today!).

These initial campaigns caught the attention of our stakeholders, the media and visitors to KOP and paved the way for an evolved look for King of Prussia District.

How it Changed

Fast forward a few years and we were ready for change in a big way. It was time for a rebrand and refresh. We stopped referring to our organization as King of Prussia Business Improvement District (KOP-BID or “The BID”) and simplified it to King of Prussia District. Enlisting the help of AgileCat, who remains our creative partner to this day, we embraced a modern new look and a clean, professional aesthetic with a new logo and website. We also launched our next campaign and our living tagline, Our Edge. Your____. This campaign was a progression of IM KOP and gave voice to the people who lived and worked here. KOP provided the edge, and its employees, residents and visitors provided the rest.

With a shiny new campaign for King of Prussia, we complimented this initiative with some new events. We introduced Yoga Happy Hour in 2014, followed by dineKOP (which you now know as KOP Restaurant Week) in 2015.

How it’s Going

As KOP continues to evolve and grow, so does our marketing, advertising and event roster. In 2019, we shifted directions from campaigns that were intended to raise awareness and drive traffic, to  a campaign that spoke directly to business owners and C-Suite executives to educate them on why KOP is the best place for their business. The Make the Move campaign, which is still active today, focuses on the many reasons why KOP is equipped to help businesses and their employees thrive, and includes eye-catching digital ads as well as billboards, busses and print publications. The campaign is complimented by a landing page, businessinKOP.com.

Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, King of Prussia District paused Make the Move to shift our focus on business recovery efforts. In addition to launching a series of virtual events and our popular Get More, KOP Gift Card Upgrade campaign, which infused the local economy with some much needed income, we got to work on an advertising campaign to welcome the public back to KOP.  Once mandated closures began to lift, we sprung into action with Let’s Go, KOP, a colorful and energetic campaign that encouraged people to safely come back to all that they love in KOP. Ads ran on social media, billboards, busses and bus shelters, and directed people to a campaign landing page, letsgoKOP.com.

In 2020 with our renewal and expansion, we introduced a new position to our Marketing team – an Events Manager. This new position played an important role in our efforts to reopen KOP, planning engaging virtual events and promotions that kept our business community top of mind. Now, as we get back to some as semblance of normal, our Events Manager is busy planning and producing our current roster of in-person events, which includes Food Truck Tuesdays, KOP Restaurant Week and KOP Shops for CHOP, KOP Beerfest Royale, First Responders Appreciation Week, and Business Networking Events.

Looking to the future, our evolution is far from over. In fact, we are hard at work right now on new events and campaigns that will roll out over the next few months. While these past two years have challenged us, they’ve also reinforced our passion for this community and our commitment to making it more attractive, vibrant and prosperous through ever-changing marketing efforts.