JohnAmardeil.com

As I said last week, we’ve been busily working on an exciting new project. Called Victory, it’s coming to Stoney Creek this fall and it’s by Empire Communities, a longstanding client of ours.

What makes Victory different is its focus on design and value. Featuring towns and detached 2-car garage homes from only $269,990, Victory puts stylish living within everyone’s reach.

Think of it this way: if it were a car, it’d be a Hyundai Sonata.

It gets better — we’re making our online marketing play a bigger role than ever before. For starters, we’re asking Victory’s Facebook fans to vote on a selection of features and finishes — we’ll let their votes guide us in refining Victory’s design and style choices.

Second, we’re holding a Facebook contest called “What’s Your Victory” whereby Facebook fans are encouraged to upload a picture or video depicting a personal victory of theirs. The prize? A weekly $50 Ikea gift card as well as a monthly $100 one.

So far, we’ve heard from a person whose missing iPod was returned by a stranger, another whose victory is to do a great workout, and someone who got to leave work early last Friday just before the long weekend rush.

It boils down to this: we want potential homeowners to see that buying a Victory home is a victory for them, both from a design and a value point of view. And we strongly believe this social media campaign will play a big role in achieving this.

In the near future, online marketing will play an increasingly major role. This is our way of moving towards that future, both for our sake as well as our clients’.

What is buying a home about? Is it about square feet?

Or is about emotion?

If you chose the second option, chances are you share with us the passion of exciting people. Chances are you also know passion sells — far more than features and facts alone.

Obvious as this all seems to many of us in the marketing industry, many builders still don’t get it. Where they should be hard at work to excite people, they continue to highlight the same old figures and information.

And when sales fail to skyrocket, they wonder where it all went wrong.

There’s a better, more effective way — one that Apple stores and other retail leaders have long used to their advantage. To inspire today’s jaded consumer, who won’t respond unless he’s inspired, these smart companies rely on cool, unique finishes.

With this in mind, we at BAM are truly delighted that, for the first time ever, a client is willing to step up and revolutionize.

In fact, Empire Communities is putting on the market the most revolutionary kitchen to be offered on a volume basis.

I commend Empire and Paris Kitchens for truly delivering something this special.

There’s a myth that only the young appreciate and use new technology.

It doesn’t pay to buy into that myth.

Mason Homes’ Port Hope Golf & Country Club is a community designed for empty nesters looking for an active lifestyle.

It would have been predictable to brush aside new technology to target this demographic. It would’ve also been safe and boring.

Wanting to address our client’s potential homeowners in an innovative way, we first decided to make music part of the campaign theme.

With that in mind, we peppered classic song lyrics on the community’s website, knowing they would appeal to homebuyers who finally get to kick back and dance to the beat of their own drum.

Against all odds, large touch screens and iPads played
an important role in a campaign aimed at empty nesters.

Next, we made large touch screen displays and iPads part of the design of the Port Hope Golf & Country Club Sales Office. Our goal was to incorporate technology in an unobtrusive manner that:

1. Served a practical purpose, and
2. Highlighted the campaign’s theme.

Here’s how it worked.

Upon entry into the Sales Office, visitors were asked to register on an iPad, and at the same time they were invited to select a song from a playlist on the iPad, which began playing right away throughout the Sales Office.

Next, visitors were invited to browse the Sales Office, where large touch screen displays had been set up displaying home renderings, floorplans and other pertinent information. 


The opening was a success. Many a visitor said they were impressed by how user-friendly the experience had been, despite their having never used an iPad before.

In the end, using technology in our client’s campaign accomplished several important goals:

1. It allowed us to highlight an older generation’s adaptability and willingness to embrace new things.
2. It incorporated fun and whimsy into the space, making our visitors feel current and young.
3. It allowed us to display multiple products at once, which made comparison easier.

So much for old myths.