Well-crafted placemaking stories breathe life and emotion into a community’s selling points and spark a meaningful connection with potential homebuyers. In our last two placemaking posts, we focused on how to create a strategically insightful placemaking story that speaks to the right audience, no matter if your community is amenity-rich or amenity-scarce.
But how do you reposition your placemaking story when you’ve added or expanded your community’s offerings? Or maybe you need to completely rebrand due to changes to the market or sales lag? In this scenario, we focus on how to retool your placemaking story to lead with expanded amenities or all-new insights while still keeping your core brand promise intact.
Expanded amenities or need for a rebrand
You’ve recently added some appealing amenities to your community, like a new community center next to the resort-style pool for social gatherings. You’ve also expanded, with a new extension that borders a scenic nature preserve and greenbelt to make outdoor activity easier for homeowners. And while the market is still hot, sales have recently stalled and research indicates a repositioning might be in order. How do you shift your placemaking story to encompass these upgrades while still preserving your brand’s core voice and tone?
Build on your current brand
If you’ve expanded your offerings and these new amenities dramatically increase the community’s desirability, a simple shift in messaging hierarchy might benefit your placemaking story. For example, your current messaging might be centered around the community’s modern homes and designer features, but you’ve recently added an activity-rich community center with more opportunities to play and socialize. Retooling your messaging to lead with the emotional value of connection, making friends and living life to the fullest, makes for a much stronger placemaking story. You can still keep language and information intact that is still relevant, but an update to the primary messaging freshens up and elevates your community’s story to be more appealing to prospective homebuyers.
A placemaking makeover
If your master-planned community has no expanded offerings but other factors account for lagging sales, like a change in the market or new trends in what homebuyers are looking for, you might consider a rebrand. Do real-time research (social listening, targeted focus groups) to determine what about your community resonates with customers, then lead with a different amenity or more emotionally relevant messaging. It’s important, in this case, to not alienate homebuyers with a rebrand that makes your current brand unrecognizable; rather, marry your new placemaking story with enough of the existing language to ensure audiences know it’s still your brand – just with a fresh spin.
To coincide with the reopening of Los Angeles following its “lost year” in tourism due to the pandemic, LA Tourism rebranded in 2021 with a new look and feel for the first time in 10 years. The updated word mark is designed with bold, iconic gradient colors that feel both throwback and “street-level cool” while playing up sunny optimism: its official comeback as a tourist destination where “anything under the sun” can happen. Along with the new brand identity, the campaign features eye-catching social pages with #StartYourComeback and posts showcasing famous LA hotspots to encourage future visits. The rebrand smartly recasts LA as a destination that celebrates individuality and welcomes everyone with open arms, while retaining the classic “California cool” vibe most associate with LA. It’s the LA everyone knows and loves but retailored to appeal to a new wave of visitors seeking diversity, culture and of course, beautiful weather.
We hope our placemaking series helps shed a light on how vital placemaking is to successfully marketing any master-planned community. No matter what type of community you have, we can help bring your placemaking story to life with smart strategy, targeted insights and messaging that appeals to the audience that’s right for your brand.
Does your brand need a refocused placemaking strategy to showcase new offerings and appeal to the right audience? We can help with that. Connect with Barbara Wray at barbara@wickmarketing.com or (512) 479-9834 to chat.
