A Dictionary of Received Property Marketing Jargon

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
🚫 exciting retail opportunity
🚫 sense of arrival
🚫 beautifully-crafted spaces

Imagine consumer goods and big brands regurgitating the same cringe cliches above that are used in marketing property to appeal to their consumers. Would they still even be in business?

The reason why everyday spaces are so bland and many developers are increasingly finding it challenging to let their buildings is because of how these spaces are designed, branded and marketed to prospective users. The process of building “design” and building “marketing and PR” are siloed and not integrated. More crucially, The development landscape is largely out of sync with its target demographic, so there is a breakdown in communication.

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. If developers, architects and agents understood the needs, habits and desires of prospective users, they would create fantastic spaces and experiences that would appeal to these prospective users - and win new ones over.

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.