Page 328 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

306 CHAPTER 10

quent forty years, the location became more a part of the city’s urban built-up area,
despite a general ambience that suggested franchise-row suburban blight. The
Melaver team had conceived Abercorn Common to evoke design elements of
Savannah’s historic downtown, while remaining true to its shopping center roots.
From a design standpoint, the site sat at the crossroads of an older historical city cen-
ter and a newer suburban one.
Even more challenging was the fact that while Melaver, Inc. knew this project would
likely be the first LEED retail shopping center in the country, the company decided
that the design should probably not scream “green” but should have the look and feel of
what tenants and shoppers were more accustomed to and yet, at the same time, serve
as a demonstration project everyone could learn from. In fact, an early concept of
incorporating a green discovery center into the shopping center was jettisoned for a
plan that called for the entire Abercorn Common to serve as a walking, living educa-
tional center with informational signage and visual clues as to what was different
about it. The project was intended to be what John Grant refers to as a “Trojan Horse”:
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“making new green stuff ...seem normal.” How do you create a marketing strategy
for a product that is radically different but looks the same? How do you pitch a
uniquely differentiated product to a universe of retail tenants that is likely uninterested
in and largely uninformed about the differentiation you are providing?
The visual language we created for Abercorn Common Shopping Center incorpo-
rated imagery and language associated with the history of Savannah, Georgia. The
name, Abercorn Common, lived deeply in the history of Savannah and incorporated a
sense of “common space.” We created a look that lived in earth colors and a feeling
of warm, historic value. Very little true advertising was done for Abercorn Common,
but the little we did featured natural imagery and spoke to tangible tenant benefits such
as the creation of a natural working relationship between big box retailers and small
boutiques, or the value of the traffic count. We talked very little about the sustainable
aspects of the development because, though it was a part of Melaver’s brand, the target
wasn’t ready for it. Our target, the retail community, is a notoriously “hard,” bottom-
line-focused group. Again, the process is basic—message, target, means:

■ Message: The most important promises we could make to the retail community
were related to location and co-tenancy. So our marketing talked to traffic counts
and anchor tenants.
■ Target: Our target was potential retail tenants—bottom-line-focused and needing
to be reassured about the value of the location to them. They were not, for the most
part, interested in green.
■ Means: We advertised in trade publications that talked directly to our target such
as Shopping Centers Today. We also created branded materials to enhance the
presence of the leasing team at conferences where they would encounter a large
concentration of potential tenants. We created a trade show booth and handout
materials using the graphic toolbox we used to express the Abercorn Common
brand. Those same graphics were used in a website that was focused primarily on