Thompson-Okanagan offers everything B.C. businesses need

For newcomers and companies alike, the Thompson Okanagan offers a little bit of everything. Wide open spaces as well as thriving cities well connected to the outside world by air, freeway, fibre optics and 5G wireless. Small towns with affordable land and high-tech clusters in niches such as cybersecurity, aerospace and viticulture. Primary along with leading-edge industries.

Kelowna is the largest city in the B.C. Interior, with one of Canada’s top 10 busiest airports and the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia, among Canada’s leading institutions of higher education and research. Other substantial cities with diverse economic bases include Kamloops, Vernon and Penticton.

But the region also features bucolic byways and untracked wilderness. The Okanagan and Similkameen valleys have long been known for fruit growing and winemaking, and cattle ranching is a venerable business in the Nicola Valley and around Kamloops. Logging operations and wood processing operations lie scattered around the region.

Mining giant Teck Resources this year received an environmental assessment certificate from the provincial government, enabling it to extend the life of the Highland Valley Copper mine near Logan Lake, one of the region’s largest and longest-running sources of employment. The extension project, bolstered by rising demand for metals critical to the global energy transition, promises to create 2,900 jobs during construction and support 1,500 ongoing operational jobs after that.

Simple ideas, big impact

Blessed with abundant sunshine, the southern Interior is also a favourite four-season destination for tourists. The Town of Princeton showed recently how even simple tourism marketing campaigns with modest budgets can yield meaningful results.

“I started going through the guest book in our visitor centre and I noticed we were getting people from all over the world,” says Gary Schatz, director of economic development and tourism. He got the idea of putting up banners on downtown lampposts welcoming visitors in various languages of their countries of origin. Then the town ran a contest to get visitors to take pictures of themselves in front of the banner in their native tongue. Combined with billboards at the Kelowna airport and on highways leading to Princeton and internet advertising, the campaign became known as Princeton Welcomes the World. This year it took the Economic Development Marketing Innovation Award (Community less than 10,000 population) at the BCEDA’s annual Economic Summit.

Just a few months in, “what we’re seeing is a steady increase in our socials,” Schatz says. Princeton’s followings on Instagram and TikTok are both over 1,000, and visitor-centre traffic has gone from 100 to 120 people a day in 2023 to more than 200 in 2025. It hit 328 one day in June.

“That’s a lot of traffic for a small visitor centre,” Schatz says. It’s given employees the chance to promote the town’s bronze sculpture walk, which is also getting noticed online. Given its limited resources, Princeton normally runs its tourism campaigns over two years, and Schatz believes Princeton Welcomes the World will translate well into 2026, when the FIFA World Cup brings even more exotic visitors to B.C.

Better together

For many years the Central Okanagan Economic Development Commission (COEDC), Tourism Kelowna and Accelerate Okanagan, a business development and investment office, all ran their own marketing campaigns aiming to promote the Central Okanagan. But beginning with some conversations in 2018 and 2019, they got the idea of pooling their resources.

“We realized we were all marketing the region and its value proposition to slightly different but overlapping audiences in slightly different ways,” explains Krista Mallory, COEDC’s manager. “We looked at how we could work together to leverage our resources and tell the story of the Okanagan in a more impactful way.”

Instead of talking about event spaces or hotel capacity, the resulting campaign focused on entrepreneurs and innovators, growth sectors such as aerospace, agriculture and digital technology, research taking place at area post-secondary institutions and other community assets. Launched after a COVID-related delay in the fall of 2020, it went by the name OKGo.

OKGo aims to attract not just tourists, business events, entrepreneurs, talented workers and business investment to the region but all at once. “We see all those pieces as linked,” Mallory says.

Over time OKGo added new key industries (cleantech, Indigenous business) and community partners (University of B.C. Okanagan, Okanagan College) to its scope. But it’s stuck to its strategy of letting local business ambassadors take the lead in a physical and digital magazine, supported by videos, social media and sharing the message in person at conferences and trade shows.

“This is really a storytelling campaign. It’s not coming from the municipality,” Mallory says. It took small individual budgets and leveraged them into a bigger joint pitch, while leaning into each partner’s strengths.

Since its inception, the OKGo website has attracted 35,756 views and 21,625 users, with a big uptick in web traffic in 2024. For that OKGo won the Economic Development Marketing Innovation Award (Community more than 25,000 population) this year from BCEDA.