Page 318 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

296 CHAPTER 10

at McDonald’s no matter where you are in the world. The fancy electronic gadget you
once coveted is now ubiquitous, cheap, and probably not that well made. A Chanel suit
is still an investment in design, workmanship, and timeless style, but now it’s a mass-
produced status symbol that can be bought at the mall in just about any major city.
That’s where the complexity enters in—the marketplace has become such an over-
whelming cacophony of hype that consumers are having a hard time matching their
values with a brand. If it’s not local, if they can’t count on quality of materials and
workmanship, and it’s not special (but instead something they can buy anywhere),
what should they look for? Enter the era of labels—where brand is connected to self,
and you use your consumer purchasing power to confirm your social status.
So where are we today? The conclusion by the Natural Marketing Institute that con-
sumers are now looking for a deeper values experience suggests that maybe the brand
experience has come full circle, with a twist. Antibiotic- and hormone-free grassfed
beef seems like a good way to protect yourself against E. coli and mad cow disease.
Tomatoes and strawberries taste so much better when they’re in season and grown
nearby. Price sensitivity and labels are still important, but we want to know what we
are buying. We’re still looking for a toy manufacturer we can trust, and foreign car
manufacturers are still making the best high-performing hybrids, but we are increas-
ingly coming around to the idea that local, sustainable, and organic equal safe, nutri-
tious, and dependable.
What does this mean for marketers? Brand is more complex than ever, but a few
things are clear, and they translate to the real estate marketplace. The green building
phenomenon means that consumers are looking to pursue new high standards in the
places where we live, work, and play. Demand for sustainable development is grow-
ing. We’ve spawned something very new. And it’s very much alive.
But, again, it’s a noisy world out there. Consumers are bombarded with messages
and left to decipher their relative truth or relevance with little help. That’s where mar-
keting and public relations expertise is critical, in helping a company interpret its
brand for the marketplace and—importantly—filtering consumer feedback for the
benefit of brand development.
In the 1990s when Melaver, Inc., first started developing green projects, sustain-
ability wasn’t the buzzword it is today, and the communications challenge was 1) to
understand internally the clear direction of the company, 2) to develop a market for
green by wooing tenants, persuading lenders and partners, and educating municipal
officials, and 3) to set in motion a paradigm change in the community and beyond for
a more sustainable mindset. We learned that it required a consistently persuasive mes-
sage, and that often the sustainability story was not persuasive enough on its own. Fair
enough. The real estate development market rightly deserves good aesthetics, sound
financials and, of course, location, location, location. These lessons serve us well
today, as we work to cut through the clutter of an increasingly crowded green mar-
ketplace. We also learned that the communications strategy for a company aspiring to
be truly sustainable evolves and deepens as the company’s own commitment and
capacity to be green evolve and deepen. Early work tends to focus on internal com-
munication—“internal branding” is what we sometimes call it—that is meant for staff