Page 327 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

MARKETING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 305

FIRST THINGS FIRST: WHO ARE YOU
AND WHAT IS THIS PROJECT?
Again, in marketing parlance, what’s your brand? Some of the hardest work you’ll do
is in identifying the inherent nature and personality of your company or your project—
in other words, your brand. But this work is vital. Knowing what your company rep-
resents and creating a compelling brand around it are keys to maintaining a
longstanding position in any market. The same is true of each project you undertake
And knowing brand at the beginning saves all sorts of identity crises on the back end.
Every message you take to the market is informed by what you know about the brand
of your company or project.

WHY BRAND?
Remember that your project is truly an expression of the company or companies behind
it. The public begins to associate projects with developers. Having a strong corporate
brand will help ensure success over the long run. Development of a corporate brand is
important business and is done in much the same way as we’ve been discussing for proj-
ects. In the case of Melaver, we were asked initially to define a visual identity for
Melaver, Inc., and then to do the same thing for the company’s various projects.

CASE STUDY: BRANDING ABERCORN COMMON—A TALE
OF TWO TARGETS

Target #1—Tenants
Branding Abercorn Common Shopping Center to potential tenants was one of Cayenne
Creative’s first project-related challenges for Melaver. Here we had the chance to
extend the Melaver, Inc. developer brand into a key project that was decidedly green.
The primary target for our message didn’t necessarily get sustainability yet. This was,
after all, before large retailers like Wal-Mart were greening their businesses, and there
were still a lot of misperceptions in the market about green. Would it cost more to rent
there? Would the quality suffer? Would a potential tenant’s hair salon be located next
door to a bunch of hemp-wearing, patchouli-scented, hippy-dippy candle makers, or
to a nationally advertised deli? Secondly, because Melaver was truly in new territory
with the LEED certified development of a 100 percent retail project, the budget for
marketing was necessarily tight and focused.
In creating the initial marketing materials, our primary inspiration—but also our
challenge—was setting. The development was something of a conundrum. On the
positive side of the ledger, it was located at the prime main-on-main retail location in
Savannah, Georgia, with a significant traffic count. Formerly the site of a shopping
complex developed by the Melaver family when it was in the supermarket business,
its bona fides as a successful and desirable retail location were unquestioned. When
the original shopping center was developed in the late 1960s, it was located along the
corridor of southern-moving sprawl beyond the city’s urban core. But over the subse-