Wrong brand positioning is faulty project planning-I

By: Harmit Chawla, Managing Director, HCorp Realty

Track2Realty Exclusive: In today’s real estate market where projects are more often than not adding only to the inventory, marketing department of respective companies are wondering as to what went wrong in the brand positioning of the project.

Of course, if the buyers are not coming forward in a market where the housing shortage is huge and ever increasing, there must be something fundamentally wrong in the positioning of the project in the given market.

Real estate insiders know how the blame game begins with every department trying its best to shrug off the responsibility and put the blame on the marketing department in general and sales team in particular. But in most cases it is as much a fault of the project planning as its positioning.

It is a complete mismatch of vision among the various departments of the company and lack of vision as far as the project positioning in the given geographical market is concerned.

In an honest admission we as the real estate professionals will have to accept the fact that in the market today there are very few projects which have occupied the mind and space of the market from the point of brand positioning that it was intended to. This calls for a quick reality check of some of the success case studies as well as the general practice that is self-destructive.

One has to understand as to what generally transpires in companies that leads to great products with great target segmentation and the perfect brand positioning.

Let us see how does the system work behind a success story and what leads to brand disaster. A company looks at a parcel of land on which it sees a future and decides to set up a real estate product. They go into a cash flow overdrive on the prospective project to come to a conclusion of the profitability and viability. In today’s market with exorbitant land rates, the in thing without using too much grey matter is to do a luxury project.

Concluding outcome of such deliberations is generally unilateral decision at the top management to do a luxury project. I must add here that real estate board rooms are generally meant for monologue and not dialogue.

Well, once the monologue process of discussion takes the ‘consensus decision’ to do a super luxury project, the hard work is over for the management. Now starts the easy part for most companies to work out the dynamics of the project where they have actually gone into self belief mode of being a marketer of luxury project.

Now the company decides on couple of adjective which could be attached to their luxury makeover. What could these be—to begin with how does the tallest sound, sure makes you look like a khalifa of buildings in India. The other options could be biggest luxury township, golf course absolutely is the epitome of luxury what if it has been the most unsuccessful segment globally (as someone told me why the hell should I pay millions for a bagicha where I hit and keep chasing a ball).

When all these fancy attractions become a sort of overkill, then we chase the world renowned architects and landscape architects and use their brand equity to leverage luxury in a project.

In recent time some company owners have also tried to brand more to themselves as real estate gurus, which is a teaser campaign prior to telling the market that they are going to launch the first luxury corporate city in a market which historically does not have great record on commercial properties.

And when all analysts are of the opinion that commercial real estate is not finding favour as a real estate asset class, some companies have shown great strategic vision and marketing abilities by naming there project after famous cities and existing luxury projects in global cities and have marketed it with such fervour as if they wanted to prove that they are product of the same DNA.

…to be continued