Architecture Marketing: Scarcity or abundance: which mindset is driving your Architecture practice?
This week London-based Wilkinson Eyre announced they would open an office in Sydney to capture opportunities that might flow from their successful completion of the new towers at Barangaroo. According to an article in the Australian Financial Review:
“Chris Wilkinson said he didn’t want to miss a trick, as he had following the practice’s Gardens by the Bay project in Singapore.
‘After Gardens by the Bay, we were given space in the client’s offices. When the project finished they closed it up and we came home. … It has had 50 million visitors, it’s more than the Taj Mahal … and we didn’t get any work at all off the back of it,’ he said.”
Wilkinson Eyre announced it will open an office in Sydney. Photography by Rajveer Singh via Unsplash.
On Twitter, someone lamented that there are enough architecture practices already, with too little work to go around. I often here that same argument in relation to the number of new graduates that emerge from universities each year. And it’s raised in relation to joint ventures as well, with all those foreign firms taking the cream of the public projects (who will win the MAAS / Powerhouse gig, due to be announced from a shortlist of six international/local firm teams, soon?).
One architect here in Perth runs a public campaign arguing that only Perth-based architects should do Perth-based work.
I think this scarcity mentality is harming Architects. Many fear that fees are so low, and the volume of work is so slight, and the threat of the project manager and their value engineering is so great, that they won’t make enough to get by. For many, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and is indeed the case.
But for those Architects who deliberately adopt an abundance mentality:
the ones who believe there is enough work to go around;
who can identify a niche or untapped opportunities for prospective clients, and then deliver upon those;
who can clearly enunciate and market the unique skills of Architects in a crowded market;
who can identify and deliver untapped opportunities in housing (especially with the recent announcement that COAG will introduce national Energy Efficiency Ratings); in retrofitting and reusing old buildings; in preparing for climate emergency AND resilience; in co-design with under-represented communities; in innovating where others can’t… ?
These architects do quite well. Many even prosper.
I recently wrote an article about Joint Ventures for Architectural Review, and I was struck by the various different approaches proffered by the three Architects I interviewed. You can read that article here.
Switching from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset is not a shift you can make overnight. But you can be intentional and deliberate about how you talk about your practice, and who you talk to. It’s important to pitch your service offering in a way that will connect with and appeal to that audience.
It became apparent to me at last week’s Architects Declare Forum here in Perth that the practices that will survive and prosper – over the next 10 years and beyond – will do so by intentionally transitioning towards a new carbon-positive economy. Will your practice be one of them?
So as well as changing your mindset, you need to take a new approach to communications and marketing, and that’s where Sounds Like Design can help. Our CPD courses provides insights and suggestions about how to better connect with your future clients and enhance your project pipeline.
You can find out more about our full range of services here.