What the heck is placemaking?

Make it a thing

No Walls Studio

Jun 07, 2024

You’ve seen the word. We use it all the time. It’s kinda ambiguous. So what does it mean?

Well, to start, here’s what placemaking provides your customers:

A sense of belonging
A whiff of aspiration
A meaningful part of their journey
Somewhere fun they want to share (because it says something cool about them)
Somewhere they can’t imagine giving up
Somewhere they value more than alternative spaces

Here’s what placemaking provides your business:

$$$ (lower customer acquisition costs, more efficient development process, more loyalty, ancillary revenue if you’re smart with it, brand equity, easier investment dollars, maybe more friends)

BUT WHAT DOES PLACEMAKING MEAN?

Placemaking is the art of combining brand, product and community into spatial experiences that shine and stick.

There are four major pillars of placemaking.

01. Crafting the Brand Story

This is defining how you're different and what you mean to customers, and it has several critical components that should be done in order:

Match what you’re good at (“core genius”) with who you’re serving (a target audience)
Learn everything you can about your target audience
Identify unique ways to serve your audience and communicate to your audience
Inventory the perspectives of your team and arrive at a shared vision for why you exist
Look for inspiration in culture outside of your category for your story and creative
Land on a singular promise that you derive from your learnings and core genius, different than everyone else’s promise, that you’ll deliver to the world (aka “Brand Positioning”)
Transform that promise into creative vision (Logo, Art, etc.)

02. Turning your story into a Space

This is where you make your brand story a branded environment. Here’s how that works:

Map your user journeys (+ staff, front and back of the house)
Identify the ideal user journey for your target audience
Define space types that support their user journeys
Craft an exterior mood that builds on the creative vision of your brand story
Craft an interior mood that builds on the creative vision of your brand story
Think of ways to bring that mood to life everywhere from façade to millwork to wayfinding
Curate art that makes your brand pop
Identify a scent that gives your brand that sensory memory
Build playlists that make the brand a soundtrack to your user’s lives

03. Turning your space into a Community

This is the making your brand story real piece and it has an oversized effect of the stickiness in placemaking. Here are the building blocks to making your space a community:

Branded hospitality training for your staff, so they know exactly how your brand story shows up in their interactions with users
Uniform systems that tell your brand story and set the overall vibe of your space and tone of your staff
Events that are totally unique to your brand, authentic to your customers, and regular enough to keep everyone interacting around your story
Collaborations with the on-brand players in your community
Interaction moments where your brand shows up outside of your building (think farmer’s markets, festivals, and sporting events)

04. On-going Iteration of your Story and Space

This is the overlooked but quietly essential part of placemaking. If you fail to evolve your spatial brand, you quickly turn irrelevant. Here’s what iteration looks like:

Allocating a certain amount of development capital to redevelopment
Creating spaces that bivalent (have a gazillion different possible uses)
Collecting constant feedback from qualitative interviews and user observations
Swapping the things that don’t cost too much (maybe: art, small FFE, digital presence, social, etc.)
Collaborating with the new and fresh brands that align with your promise

Okay, now you get it. Hopefully, the definition is clear. It’s time to get into placemaking. Say tuned to this channel, we’re going to follow up next week with some examples of the best placemaking brands in the world.

🚨 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):