Whether you’re building a restaurant, hotel, office, apartment or coffee shop, your neighbors (owned operating businesses, retail tenants, and adjacent projects) will have a heavy hand in shaping the environment surrounding your brand, and in turn, the way people think about your brand.
You can and should design for this extended environment.
Why does context matter? Take the example of the upscale mall.
Not the one with Sbarro’s, Aeropostale and an ailing Barnes and Noble. The one with Neiman Marcus, Chanel, and Alo. It's usually in the fancier neighborhood. It’s surviving the Mall-apocalypse.
Does the nice mall have the same Starbucks or Macys as the not-so-nice mall? Often, yeah.
Do those brands hit a little differently in posh-land because the air smells better, there’s a Porsche 911 display just outside the front door, and everyone looks a bit fancier? Yeah.
You may even assume you’re getting a better assortment, different products, and nicer merchandising than the exact same brand, a few miles away. Probably not. You’re just living in a specific brand context, and that context is influencing your perceptions of quality.
The good news: you too can create or influence a branded environment that enhances your primary development. Here’s our recommendations on leveraging brand and design to create a mixed-useful world, ranging from where you have full control to absolutely no control over your neighbors.
Scenario 01 - Full Control
You’re developing a mixed-use apartment, office, or hotel. You’re creating and embedding additional owned operating businesses inside of your asset (your own food and beverage, retail brand, etc.). Here’s what to do:
Think about marrying your “why” for the project at large with your secondary or tertiary business(es). Answer the question: how can this new operating business supplement my overarching brand to enhance my customers’ lives? Then, create a form and function that connects your new operating brand to your development’s brand (easier said than done, but we’ll expand upon this strategy in future pieces).
Establish a “brand architecture” for your development and operating businesses. Brand architecture = an intentional relationship between the brand promise, personality, and visual identities of two or more brands. Make these new businesses relatives, but not exact clones (because clones are lame) of your development brand.
Bridge the gap between the development’s customer-facing service arm and your operating businesses. Introduce promotions, cross-product interactions (like room service) and co-branded events to further spotlight the full branded environment.
Scenario 02 - Medium Control
You’re developing a mixed use apartment, office or hotel + retail on the ground floor. You’re leasing retail space to tenants.
Lean heavily into your knowledge of your target customer and their journey to choose relatable tenants. Prioritize the retail that would round out their nearby options. Focus on brands that look and feel like brands that your end customers would want to consume.
Go way beyond the white box to define a common and complementary design system. Design retail spaces that interplay in interesting and beneficial ways with your other retail spaces and your primary development via your programming, material story, and landscape architecture (where applicable).
Bonus = create a separate but related brand for the retail space. Use creative (naming, messaging, and visual identity) to inspire specific retail tenants and shape the type of environment that would be appealing to your end customer.
Scenario 03 - No Apparent Control
The mixed use part of your neighborhood vision is limited or, you may be the cutting edge brand in a changing neighborhood.
Collaborate with your brand brethren. Sure, the project next door is a DMV/Wells Fargo/something else boring, but you’re determined to create a vibe. Bring elements of the most like-minded brands into your space via events, partnerships, and small touches (e.g. hotel cosmetic brand partners).
Shop out your brand to culturally-relevant happenings. A spatial brand can and should exist outside of physical footprint. Depending on your target customer, find ways to show up in their lives. Host a stand at the farmers market, hand out co-branded coasters at the new restaurant launch, screen a movie at the park, etc.
Editorialize about on-brand local neighbors. Write about the businesses and cultural institutions nearby that align with your brand. Showcase your “chosen” neighbors through a card, zine, or book. Provide updates to your consumers when new on-brand businesses launch and maintain a calendar of relevant events somewhere across your marketing channels.
Just remember, your spatial product is not a castle. Customers walk in, out, and around. They arrive at your product from somewhere and leave to go somewhere else; these destinations and that experience should play into your thinking.
The more you can extend your story to the areas surrounding your development–critical touchpoints for consumers’ perceptions of your brand–the more likely it is that your story will stick.
🚨 WHO IS NO WALLS STUDIO (AND WHAT DO WE DO)?
No Walls Studio is a design and brand consultancy that helps placemakers create spaces that people love.
Our mission is to make sameness extinct in real estate, which means that everything we do comes with new ideas and unique angles — all, grounded in a deep understanding of culture and consumers.
We do three things for our clients (often, all in the same project):
Research
Brand Development
Spatial Experience Design
Want to work with us or learn more?