Urban State strategy and brand creation

Developing any new brand is an important exercise and one that should consider the individual personalities behind the brand, as well as the future vision and target audience it’s attempting to connect with. When a company is in its inception, there are many hopes and dreams at its foundation and even more lofty goals to aspire to. The difference between the success or failure of these aspirations comes down to sound planning and strategic guidance. Building a brand really does begin from the ground up. You should understand its intended market position, values and guiding principals. What problem does the company/product solve? Why should anybody care about it? Once we understand the foundations of the brand and the reason it exists, we can bring it all together into a viable and practical reality.

For Urban State, one of the biggest challenges we faced was finding a way to showcase four very experienced but different professionals who had banded together to form this new business venture. In their own individual ways, they each brought specialised skills from the fields of development, finance, design, planning, and sales and marketing, so the task of combining that knowledge – and still reflecting their history of running four separate companies in four very different ways – made creating a set of values that could portray a united front as the Urban State brand something that needed to be carefully considered and crafted. Their shared vision was to present a premium property development brand to the Melbourne landscape that focussed on providing personalised service and delivering smaller-sized, boutique projects, all-the-while backed by their combined experience in delivering some of the city’s most iconic and successful projects to date. Shining a spotlight on such a unique collaboration, made up from individual expertise and attitudes, needed to be done with genuine authenticity in order to help focus on what we believed was a definite point of differentiation that would help set them apart in a competitive market-place. While also ensuring each stakeholder understood their role within the company to ensure its success.

Helping the target audience believe in Urban State as a flexible brand that could connect with both consumers who are purchasing the end product, and also investors who are needed to create a product, was dealt with through comprehensive research and understanding of the property development market. Effective messaging to both disparate buyer groups needed to let investors know they were connecting with a brand that’s trustworthy, while also ensuring potential individual customers are emotionally engaged with the brand story and a belief that the brand is something that they can buy into with confidence. By presenting Urban State as a brand that was firmly positioning itself to deliver a premium product, as distinct from a luxury product, was the ideal strategy to help promote their project marketing ventures of smaller, boutique apartment developments. By choosing to focus on the Directors’ combined relationship-building skills and the value they held in authentic connections, we were able to craft a story that resonated perfectly with its audience and the team behind the brand – something that established Urban State as a company with clear leadership and vision, as well as a commitment to producing quality projects.