As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, potential buyers are now more than ever looking for lifestyle solutions to large-scale problems. In “Your Existence Depends on Creating the Right Experience,” the opening panel for the second day of Zonda’s recent Future Place virtual event, Milesbrand president and brand strategist David Miles and Zonda principal Mollie Carmichael examined how community design, branding, and buyer experience can convey satisfaction essential needs for safety, comfort, and belonging.
“As we look to the future, there are many forces shaping our view of what it looks like, beginning with the exponential growth pace of technology, epitomized by the smartphone, which is really setting these unrealistic expectations for instant gratification,” says Miles. “Layer on to that how our lives have been disrupted and taken out of our control in unprecedented ways, and then this 24-hour news cycle that is continually bombarding us with sensationalized negativity. You put those all together, and it’s producing a tremendous sense of anxiety and fear.”
As a result, Miles concludes that community has never been so important as it is today. “Understanding needs, wants, and desires is the key to producing great experiences,” he says. Citing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, he notes it is hard for people to achieve the highest tiers of needs, including self-actualization, when their primary concerns lie further down.
Safety is characterized by the “flight to the suburbs” and the reconsideration of living situations. Miles cites the Ave Maria community, in southwest Florida, as an example of the ways in which marketing can be used to convey safety in suburban communities. One of the community’s marketing photos depicts a group of children on bicycles with no adult in sight—implying they can safely roam the community without the need for supervision. Another promotional video contrasts the stressors of urban life with the “big small town” Ave Maria aims to offer, including “dealing with crowds” as applied to a child moving through a group of adults at a party.
Belonging has become more difficult as screen-based communication in many cases takes the place of physical interaction. One reaction to this situation—where community is broken down and people are “touch-hungry”—is an emphasis on “artisanal/handmade” experiences, as a contrast to digital and user interfaces.
“[This] speaks to a universal longing for the tactile and real,” Miles says. Strategies to provide this handmade experience include an emphasis on art and creativity in marketing materials and/or providing maker spaces within the community.
These experiences lead into self-actualization through arts and culture, conveyed in marketing and community design via creative placemaking. Miles provides a number of examples of this focus in practice, including the Wynwood community and surrounding area in Miami that is now home to the highest concentration of street art in the country thanks to strategic purchasing and planning, and Arts Brookfield in New York City that hosts more than 500 cultural experiences every year, with over 1 million attendees total.
In order to convey the ways in which a community can satisfy these base human needs, Miles emphasizes the importance of high-quality visuals. They can be photographs, renderings, or even full-on virtual rendering elements if need be, but they should feel real, he says, and not “clunky” or distracting.
Marketing first means knowing your audience and targeting what’s meaningful to them, adds Zonda’s Carmichael. Across all age groups, 60% to 70% of new-home buyers generally start their home search by researching online. Baby boomers are the most likely to start this way, while millennials are most likely to find new homes by driving the area, and members of the silent generation are most likely to start by going to an open house.
However, even in the past six months with COVID-19 ongoing, the majority of buyers would prefer to buy a home in person after visiting in person. Gen X and millennial buyers are slightly more likely to prefer to buy online after an in-person visit, but less than 10% of buyers would prefer to buy entirely online. This stands in contrast to the retail sphere as a whole, where more than 50% of buyers purchase products online—more so now than ever.
In terms of how different consumer groups use the internet, older buyers are more likely to use a computer, while younger groups are more likely to browse the internet on their phones. Facebook is the most widely used social media across all age groups, while younger users have a stronger preference for Instagram than other groups.
In new-built housing, while buying online is convenient and allows for comparison pricing, it comes with its own special challenges. A home is a big purchase with a complicated sales process, and it requires great trust in the new-home brand.
To incentivize online activity, Carmichael recommends “making it simple.” Not only should builders include immersive digital experiences like virtual model home tours, but these and other experiential features should be easy to access. She recommends utilizing Google Pro as a means for users to virtually walk through the neighborhood around a new home. From there, the process of choosing home features, and even buying a home or printing a package to drop off in person, should be just as simple and painless.
