Truly Deeply/Madly

Unin­spired Liv­ing
The home build­ing mar­ket in Aus­tralia is typ­i­fied by a bland range of home designs, brought to you by a range of equally undif­fer­en­ti­ated busi­nesses. Hav­ing worked in the space for a num­ber of clients over the past five years, I would define the mar­ket offer as afford­able = unin­spir­ing. Whilst there is no cheaper way, and per­haps even no eas­ier way to build your own home,the price you pay is a lack of indi­vid­u­al­ity, and poor and dated design qual­ity. A walk through any dis­play vil­lage will rein­force the mes­sage, as each house you enter feels almost iden­ti­cal from the one before, down to the last dis­play vase fea­tur­ing splayed bamboo.

These home builders all have their own brands, we have helped some to define them. But when it comes to prod­uct — which is surely one of the most defin­ing expres­sions of their brand — there is no dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion or trans­la­tion of their brand into the homes they build and dis­play. It ‘s as though they’ve all use the same archi­tect to design their homes and the same styl­ist to pre­pare them for display.

But times are chang­ing, or at least the indus­try is catch­ing up with the times.

Inspi­ra­tion built-in
Recently the offer­ings of at least two Aus­tralian home build­ing com­pa­nies have begun to deliver on the often heard brand promise of ‘con­tem­po­rary liv­ing’. Work­ing with archi­tects of note and abil­ity, InForm Homes and Inter­mode Homes have both pro­duced some great look­ing houses that feel ‘archi­tect designed’ both inside and out, cre­at­ing a strong sense of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, posi­tion­ing their new prod­uct at the pre­mium end of their market.

The Inform Pod House is a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Mel­bourne archi­tect Barn­aby Chiver­ton. The house con­sists of two pods which can be posi­tioned at dif­fer­ent angles, or dif­fer­ent lev­els to suit a slop­ing site. This is the level of cus­tomised smarts that’s been miss­ing from the dis­play home mar­ket to date. Whilst the ink on the new design for the Pod House is still dry­ing, Inform plan to have a dis­play house open at Mt Martha shortly.

Design as a pre­mium dif­fer­en­tia­tor
Dis­cus­sion around the unques­tion­able value of design to busi­ness is gath­er­ing speed and impor­tance within the cor­po­rate world. A recent Busi­ness Review Weekly arti­cle stated sim­ply; ‘busi­nesses that utilise good design can stand out from the crowd and show stronger growth and prof­its’. The British Design Coun­cil reported recently that design-oriented com­pa­nies in the UK out­per­formed the FTSE 100 Index by more than 200%. As the body of evi­dence grows weightier-still, it’s nice to see busi­nesses apply­ing the the­ory, grab­bing hold of great design for their prod­ucts and in so-doing estab­lish­ing a clearly defined and highly aspi­ra­tional mar­ket dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion for their brand.

We work with our clients to fuse great design into their brand, it’s prod­ucts and ser­vices. If you’d like to catch-up for an inspir­ing dis­cus­sion about how design can work harder for your brand, give us a call or drop us an email.

Dave.

Tags: Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Strategy, Corporate Image, Graphic Design Melbourne, Melbourne Brand Strategy, Value of Design

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 8:11 am and is filed under Small Brands Big Personalities, Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.