Scpt's Branding Strategy

1. What are the reasons that explain the traditional lack of branding in this industry?

According to Lippincott & Margulies branding is about the intangible assets. A brand is the feeling you get when interacting with an entity, it is a certain culture. The real estate industry has a tendency to focus on physical aspects rather than focusing on branding the service. This is one of the reasons that explain the traditional lack of branding in the real estate industry. A number of other reasons are available and will be presented and discussed in the following.

According to Scot Sellers, often companies "slap names on their properties and call this branding". The real estate industry is only focusing on ways to benefit from branding, without pursuing a proper pre-defined strategy. Their main aims are to focus on consistency and professionalism. The real estate thinks that this is a platform from which branding can be constructed. Since they do not include proper management capabilities, they are not capable of pursuing a proper branding initiative. Dana Hamilton complemented these arguments with the fact that the real estate often trades in the stock market at a discount to net asset value, conclusive it all depends on the tangible assets. The revenues do not depend on intangible assets. As proposed by Dana Hamilton some in the industry can consider branding as window dressing. They want to see the tangible results / the immediate. If any ‘branding’ was taking place in the industry, it usually was minimal, ultimately attempting to create a standard. It was typical for the industry to adopt the name of the property as a location descriptor. The history behind this entailed private developers building apartments and then re-selling them. Additionally there was also no historic evidence on how branding could contribute to the company on behalf of the property.

According to Capey Lester the real estate industry is a challenging business, where complaints are...