When it comes to selling a site, the industry’s marketing materials are less than visionary – here’s what we’d change.
It’s a classic scene: Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the former stockbroker Jordan Belford in The Wolf of Wall Street, takes a pen out of his suit jacket and challenges top sales executives to sell the pen back to him.
A cliché, maybe, but a valuable lesson. The pen might be well made, it might look and feel great, but what if you’re being offered 5, 10 or even 100 other pens? To sell this pen, you’ve got to make it seem like the pen.
But what if they all essentially look and perform the same? How do you sell something that has no obvious unique benefits – to a customer with plenty of other options?
Answer: Understanding the buyer. What motivates them? What makes them tick? What challenges do they face? With this information we can create a narrative for how this pen, and only this pen, will solve their problems – problems they themselves may not have known they had.
How do you sell something that has no obvious benefits – to a customer with plenty of other options?
But let’s say this pen isn’t a pen at all. Let’s say it’s a parcel of land with development potential, competing against other land parcels, all with similar perceived potential. How would you go about selling it?
*ding ding ding ding* You guessed it – a Vision Document!
But (sadly) the excitement tends to dry up here.
Losing our vision?
It’s a great idea…in theory – laying out a basic framework for how a development opportunity might be realised and setting it in the context of emerging policies. It not only reassures the audience of its feasibility, but it also allows them to imagine what the development might look like. Essentially, it’s a great opportunity to sum up why this is the pen for them.
A Vision Document aims to not only reassure the audience of a development’s feasibility, but to also allow them to imagine what it might look like.
However, these documents are rarely crafted with the pinpoint focus of someone whose livelihood depends on their next sale. What ought to be honed marketing materials – pitching unique benefits and exciting opportunities, never before seen, never to be seen again – are often a painfully dry presentation of facts and figures.
But this wasn’t always the case. There was a time when Vision Documents made all the difference. They sparked the interest of Councillors and Officers by promoting sites in a new and exciting way. But now every site has one, and to make matters worse – they all look more or less the same.
Far from unique or attention-grabbing, decision makers now see these documents as predictable, even tedious.
Granted, some are more visually appealing than others. But they all follow a fairly formulaic structure and make similar promises when it comes to the developer’s merits, deliverability, and compliance. Far from unique or attention-grabbing, decision makers now see these documents as predictable, even tedious. And this means we’re breaking the cardinal rule of sales: missing the mark with our audience. An audience that includes everyone from the officers and politicians to the general public.
What are we not seeing?
A Vision Document sounds so, well… visionary! And at the end of day, it should be. Because we aren’t selling a pen – we’re selling a development opportunity: we’re selling a vision of the future. But all too many of today’s Vision Documents fall short of inspiration and only really fulfil the most basic definition of the word.
What if instead of simply providing a view of the future, this material prompted the audience to imagine a better one? What if it reflected their aspirations and introduced solutions that solved their problems (such as a net-zero world) thus creating a strong emotional attachment? The future of the site in question would become intrinsically tied to their vision of their own. (Now that would sell a pen.)
What if instead of simply providing a view of the future, this material prompted the audience to imagine a better one?
Like any other marketing or sales material, Vision Documents should consider the ‘customer journey’ from initial awareness through to ‘making the purchase’. (Or in this case, to ‘making the decision to allocate a development site’.)
Having gone through our own re-brand in 2021, it’s become crystal clear to us that every pen, and every site, needs branding as much as any business does.
We’re not talking visual representation alone. It’s all about creating a clear identity and delivering a core message – one that resonates with the audience because it makes them feel things.
In its simplest form, the human brain can be broken down into two parts – the first is impulsive and emotional, the second is rational and reasoned. Studies have shown that around 90-95% of all decision making happens in the first.
Which is bad news for Vision Documents, which only really appeal to the second.
The Vision Document shouldn’t just be about what the site can do. It has to suggest what it can do that others can’t. And it should do it in a way that sparks that emotional connection.
To do this, we’re making a radical suggestion: something that may have never been done before.
Why not ask the experts?
As an industry, we get expert consultants, engineers, public relations and lobbyists involved in every part of the process – including the production of Vision Documents. Why then would we not be bringing in the specialists when it comes to crafting a narrative? Why wouldn’t we bring in a marketing agency to help land our message?
This isn’t to step on the toes of those who already produce Vision Documents. This is about adding value – a core mantra of Calibro’s business. It’s about taking the quality work of experts and specialists and bringing it together with a clear message, in a way that engages the right people and sparks the right discussions.
This is about adding value – a core mantra of Calibro’s business.
It’s an approach that Calibro has already put in action with the support of our marketing partners, Proctor & Stevenson – marketing experts to some of the world’s leading brands, such as Panasonic, Daikin, and Saudi Arabia’s ECZA (Economic Cities and Special Economic Zones Authority).
Together we are putting forward the idea that a Vision Document can do so much more. It can build a narrative and take the reader on a journey – answering the “why us?” and “why here?” along the way. But implicitly it’s also answering the “why not there” question which, in the beauty parade of sites considered by Councils, is just as important.
The idea is to organically lead the reader to the same over-riding conclusion as us – that our site is the site.
The idea is to organically lead the reader to the same over-riding conclusion as us – that our site is the site. And we put just as much thought and creativity into this as we do the rest of our work. As anyone who knows Calibro knows, we like to break the mould. We’re always asking the question: is this done this way because it’s what’s best, or because it’s what’s been done before? And if the answer is the latter, we look for ways to optimise and innovate.
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