Good marketing makes you feel something. More importantly, you remember how it made you feel. Every year, the John Lewis Christmas ad brings tears to my eyes. I feel compelled to do something crazy for love every time I see Natalie Portman screaming on rooftops for Dior. I still remember fondly the 2010 ‘everyone needs a Harvey’ ad. 

A journalist tested this theory and asked a hundred brands what emotions they were trying to sell. Ninety-three responded 'trust'. One said 'blue' in reference to the colour. Most brands default to the same safe, dare I say, boring words to describe themselves. The built world is no exception. You will find 'collaborative', 'community-focused', 'design excellence', 'market leading' peppered across websites. They are all valid and important points for our clients but they're also completely forgettable and they certainly don't pull at the heartstrings.

I've spent the past fifteen years putting together marketing strategies and campaigns for engineering and architecture firms. At every kick-off meeting with leadership I would ask: What's our USP? What are we trying to get across? The response would almost always be: 'we're multidisciplinary', 'we are the only one who can deliver a project from design to completion', 'we're collaborative'. It’s not wrong and certainly the qualities and expertise clients look for. But I also never came across someone who said they were difficult to work with. Everyone uses these terms because it’s mostly true of everyone, which is exactly why saying it doesn’t tell anyone anything. 

My biggest issue is that we’re designing campaigns about ourselves when it should be about the people we design for. We build the places people fall in love with, raise families in, learn in, recover in, grow old in. Then we somehow end up marketing them like a spec sheet. I would have loved to hear just once in one of those meetings 'we're building a place for people to feel safe in' or something like that. Research published by Forbes on brand loyalty found that roughly six in ten long-term customers described the brands they stay loyal to in emotional language.

It matters more than usual right now. The UK housing market is incredibly tough, clients are struggling to sell and schemes get shelved on viability grounds. The industry is now being asked more and more by clients to support their project launch and raise awareness to drive sales. Our go-to, mine included when I used to work on the other side, is to reach for the same tested techniques: the video featuring the project leader and the client, the case study showing how the team responded to the client brief, and the award submission. 

Out of curiosity, I went through a sample of our industry's own websites and looked at our homepages, about pages, and the blurb at the top of the services pages. I counted every "we," "our" and "us," then counted every "people," "client" and "community." What stood out was how consistently the first group outnumbered the second. Across the sites I looked at, we talked about ourselves roughly four times more than we talked about the people we're supposedly building for. And that includes the businesses whose entire personality is built on the words "people-centred."

I think that’s something we really need to think about in bids as well. Yes, the client and the end user are often different people: a housing association is the client, the residents are the users. But the person scoring your bid is frequently a user themselves. They'll take the bus. They'll sit in the waiting room they might have commissioned. A bid that shows real understanding of what a place feels like to use becomes more persuasive to the human reading it. 

Capturing what people feel is hard after the fact, which is why the fix is timing, not tone. Community engagement happens throughout a project; marketing is rarely involved. We try to reconstruct what a scheme meant to people months after handover, by which point the architect who sat with a family in temporary accommodation talking about what a secure home would mean to them is holding the best material on the project, and it's already gone, or it's sitting in someone's inbox who left the business two years ago. That's as much a retrieval problem as a timing one: if that conversation had been logged somewhere like a DAM Library, everyone could actually find it; it wouldn't have needed to survive in one person's memory; it would just be there, ready to reuse in the next bid or campaign that needs it. 

Which brings me back to the beginning. I know emotional storytelling feels riskier to sign off on than the safe, familiar language. It's why I liked seeing the Humanise campaign's Mayors' Guide make almost the same case to city leaders this year: fight the "blandemic," the flat, forgettable schemes that could be dropped into any town and nobody would notice, and design instead for how a place should feel to live in. Same instinct as everything above, just aimed at planning policy instead of a brochure. If city leaders are being asked to build for joy and belonging rather than square footage, the rest of us describing what they build can surely do the same.