As part of the Mullingar Chamber’s #Love Mullingar initiative, a new mural of Niall Horan was unveiled on Friday, March 25. The mural was painted by award winning artist Shane Turner.
Mullingar Chamber launch- ed its ‘Love Mullingar’ brand earlier this year – a marketing campaign to help promote Mullingar and all the great things it has to offer. The main objectives of the campaign are to increase footfall in Mullingar town by creating awareness and ensuring a consistent brand for Mullingar as a town.
Strong branding increases the value of a location, provides direction and motivation, and will contribute to making Mullingar a quality destination in the Midlands and throughout Ireland.
The new branding represents people’s perception of Mullingar, its retail and hospitality services, its reputation and how we advertise and market the town.
The popularity of social networks, especially the visually-focused Instagram platform, has created a need for Instagramable spaces to attract visitors and entice them to spend time and money in Mullingar as part of a wider tourism and consumer experience.
These selfie-worthy spaces inspire visitors to share photos and videos of their experiences, creating invaluable word-of-mouth marketing for Mullingar and also fit in with some established Instagramable images of the town, the most popular being the Joe Dolan statue at Market Square.
The Mullingar Chamber Retail Team sought to identify areas of the town that would work well with this plan. The view from many consultation groups was that this was an ideal location which would benefit from an upgrade/enhancement.
A tribute to Niall Horan, one of Mullingar’s greatest assets, was the unanimous choice for the wall.
Mullingar Chamber have further plans to promote Mullingar as the ‘Music Capital’ across more projects later in the year. The mural chosen for Dominick’s Street of Niall Horan has a young, fresh feel about it and it has the #LoveMullingar logo over it, adding to the branding for Mullingar.
The image rights were agreed with Niall directly.
David Quirke, Retail Team lead, said: “We have lots more exciting plans over the coming months to enhance our streetscapes and other key features to be developed around Mullingar. All of these plans will help promote Mullingar as a destination to visit, shop and live in. We know that these new installations will be very much photographed, further helping to promote Mullingar and what it has to offer.”
Aisling Coleman, Mullingar Chamber of Commerce, said: “The old wall was obscured with graffiti and certainly needed an update. It is a tribute to Niall Horan, just one of the many great talents Mullingar has to offer.
“We have showcased all of the talents that were previously on the wall, along with so many others, on our Wall of Fame Page on our new website Mullingar. ie” Aisling observed that it is part of “a constant task of improving the Mullingar streetscape,” and that they were looking forward to the next project in the campaign.
