Prince George making a push for you to move to that city
Posted October 28, 2014 8:27 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Have you ever thought of giving up a lavish lifestyle in Metro Vancouver to take advantage of affordable housing and job opportunities in other parts of BC?
You may have noticed a marketing campaign promoting life in Prince George. SkyTrain stations are just a few of the places you may spot the posters.
One poster at a Canada Line station near our studio reads “Stop living paycheque to paycheque” with a picture of a man golfing. It includes the URL of a website that lists the top ten reasons to move to Prince George.
Number one is being able to buy your dream house. Others include job opportunities and less traffic on the roads.
Heather Oland with Initiatives Prince George, which launched the campaign, says there are ads on buses, at transit stops, and at post-secondary institutions; there’s also a social media campaign online.
“You don’t have to live paycheque to paycheque, you can afford to save for your kids’ education, you can afford to take vacations, you can afford to pay off your mortgage,” says Oland.
“The idea is that Prince George is the largest city in one of the fastest-growing regions of the country,” she tells us. “At the end of 2013, there were only eleven other cities in the entire country that have a lower unemployement rate than we do, so we are certainly looking to grow our population and expand our work force. We’ve got a number of different messages… we’re letting people know about the quality of life in Prince George.”
Oland adds they need to overcome some misperceptions about Prince George and mid-sized cities in general.
“Some of the perceptions that people have about mid-sized Canadian cities is that they’re more expensive, or that they don’t have [the same] access to good health care, or they don’t have [as much] access to good education opportunities, or they don’t have employment opportunities. And all of those things are not true about Prince George.”
“It’s well-targeted,” says Charles Weinberg, a marketing professor at UBC. “People who are commuting are people who are probably thinking about, ‘Do I want to be on this long commute forever?’ So, they’re certainly hitting the right target market.”
“Clearly there’s a lot of concern about affordability of housing in Vancouver at all levels, and particularly for young families, so, yes, I think it’s a good strategy to try to target these people,” he tells us.
Oland says the campaign will be rolled out in 10 places in Canada, and will continue over the next several months.
