Unlocking and explaining the value of your architecture

Are you in the habit of looking back over past projects to determine where and how your architecture unlocked value for others? Your clients may have achieved better yields or faster sales on houses or apartments you designed; or perhaps the tenants of your client’s commercial office projects benefited from well-designed spaces, and tracked a discernible boost to their business productivity across certain performance metrics.

Or what if the benefits of your design rippled outwards to impact a whole town and the surrounding region? That’s what happened after spaceagency architects worked with Dome Café Group MD and CEO Nigel Oakey on the Premier Mill Hotel in Katanning. 

My article from Architectural Review

You can read all about that transformation – of a derelict but much-loved building, into a major attraction that has benefited the entire Great Southern region of WA – in this article I wrote for Architectural Review (you can read it here).

Nigel Oakey was sppke about the project at an event I attended last year, called Creating Places that Boom, and he emphasised the importance of undertaking research to understand your market. Before this project, he’d employed anthropological researchers to better understand how customers behaved in Dome Cafes and what they enjoyed about spending time there, and it wasn’t just the coffee and cake.

“We’ve come to realise that we are as much in the storytelling business as we are in the café business or the property business,” Oakey said. “I now employ a full-time social historian and author, and three graphic designers.

“It’s all about understanding who you are, what do you do, and why the hell does it matter?”

The keynote speaker at the event echoed that view. Guy Taylor from Place Brand Agency - who led the rebranding of Tasmania over the past decade – described a shift away from features and benefits, to focus on the state’s cultural attributes.

Before embarking on a new branding strategy for the state, Taylor conducted research to find out how competing tourism destinations marketed their offerings, which enabled him to differentiate Tasmania’s pitch. He then sought out local stories to counter the generic sameness he’d observed elsewhere, unearthing a surfing-Japanese-sushi chef and ‘The Laird of Crackpot’, both of whom feature in Discover Tasmania tourism videos on YouTube.

“[The brand] can’t be designed from the top down, or purchased from an advertising agency, it has to have a cultural component,” Taylor said. “And it must exist within a structure, and the organisation that houses the place-brand needs to be able to transcend political cycles with its own legislation. 

“Importantly, you need to be able to evaluate its performance over time.”

In Tasmania, that ongoing evaluation measures factors such as: population, skilled migration, foreign direct investment, sales growth for goods and services (both domestically and internationally), education levels and general community well-being. (Our free Marketing Metrics spreadsheet is a good place to start tracking your practice’s marketing investment and results).

These examples may seem tangential to architecture, but they offer insights into how you can better explain your value to your future clients. Have you systematically collected data about the ways you’ve helped your clients – or their clients – unlock new opportunities and potential, like the Premier Mill Hotel did for Katanning?

Or have you conducted research about what your customers want and need (which is not always the same thing!) and used those insights to frame marketing messages to appeal to future clients, like Guy Taylor did for Tasmania?

Both of these approaches require you to undertake research and collect data, and then to frame your findings into stories that will resonate with future clients. Then you can distribute them across the six key channels: Referrals, Email, Social Media, Publishing, Awards and your Website.

SLD’s Review + Reset package helps architects to understand their points of difference – and every firm has some, because every firm has different strengths and attributes. We also identify your ideal target market/s, and your operating context and competitors – and then use all that knowledge and intel to craft messages that will speak directly to your target audience. 

If you’re interested in finding out more about the package, click here for details.