Are developers getting their money’s worth with the marketing that is being pumped out to promote and let their developments? Building branding and marketing literature are essential components in promoting developments in real estate to achieve lettings or sales but are they really being used to their full potential?
What makes this rather odd is that the landscape of marketing and PR in London is on a different planet in terms of innovation, ingenuity and engagement. In a league of Ogilvy, Saatchi and Saatchi and Leo Burnett, why does property marketing come across as cutting-edge as a soap advert painted on a brick wall in 1890? Oh, but there’s a website with punchy graphics so that levels the field.
Bland brochures with the same regurgitated format of location photos and restaurants, a lazy rehash of the tube map, dated CGIs as sexy as dad jokes and floorplans.
And then there’s the jargon, which sounds more like Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues with such language being ubiquitous in almost all property marketing literature:
Stunning New Development - said every marketing brochure about the same cookie-cutter, brick slip shoebox that looks like every other new-build development since 2010. Planners and architects have done a sterling job of turning London into an austere Soviet-style city albeit with copious amounts of brick (slips). Marketers have done a commensurate job of labelling such built form “stunning”.
Exciting Retail Opportunity - Am I missing something for not getting excited about a shell-and-core retail unit? I guess “exciting retail opportunity” is the soulmate of “active frontage” that architects wax lyrical about. The universe of retail is indeed very exciting but how is this captured here?
Sense of arrival - To yawnsville perhaps. You’d think they’re describing Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) making an entrance to his own theme tune by Francis Monkman in The Long Good Friday, or Susie Bannion (Jessica Harper) arriving at the school/witches coven in Dario Argento’s Susperia. But alas, they’re talking about an uninspiring reception space.
Encouraging Wellbeing - Cyclist facilities and operable windows, which are quite common staples in office design, are described as unique and consciously designed to promote wellbeing. A new addition making the rounds is “encouraging people to take stairs” - which is a fantastic design move; however, this description is being gratuitously applied to spaces where the stairs are tucked away and value-engineered in sad enclosed shafts, not spaces where stairs are features and prominent.
Beautifully tailored spaces - delivered in new offices by an avalanche of white plasterboard, off-the-shelf fire doors with vision panels, lazily cobbled together patterns meant to be a feature wall or art or whatever; winding corridors and almost unlivable layouts in housing.
The endemic ennui created by the architectural profession has been contagious, and if architecture is so insipid, then what can brand consultants and marketers do? Lazy words seem befitting for lazy designs. This is only one facet of the problem. The other facet is that the process of building “design” and building “marketing and PR” are siloed and not integrated. Architects as lead designers should be liaising with agents and marketing professionals to work hand-in-glove to strategise and develop architectural designs and produce desirable spaces where branding is pivotal in the design process .
Architecture and property development are screaming for a paradigm shift: Developers, architects and marketers need to view real estate development as a commodity and the users as consumers.
Watch that space.
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