Background

Sperry Van Ness is one of the nation’s largest commercial real estate brokerage firms. Unlike other commercial real estate brokers, Sperry Van Ness markets all properties on a national basis to a 100,000-strong brokerage and investment community. This model, known as cooperation, allows Sperry Van Ness to maximize exposure for its clients’ properties, thereby maximizing the value. Other firms don’t use this model primarily because it requires that they share commissions with competitors. Instead, these firms prefer to “double-end” deals, ensuring that all the commission is kept in-house. Sperry Van Ness believes this is a broken model because it fails to put the clients’ interests first.

Issue

While Sperry Van Ness had a unique business model, they were having trouble expressing it consistently, and in a way that was clear and compelling to all target audiences. The challenge was to define a straightforward brand position and express it through messaging.

Strategic Insight

RiechesBaird conducted over 20 interviews with executives, employees, clients, Sperry Van Ness advisors (brokers) and even competing brokers. We also reviewed the company’s current marketing materials, as well as those of several key competitors.

Our analysis uncovered several key insights. First, the company was spending so much time explaining the details of their one-of-a-kind, cooperative model, that brokers and clients alike were getting bogged down in the details instead of focusing on the benefits and spirit of cooperation. In external interviews, we confirmed that the benefits of cooperation—the creation of bidding wars, the emphasis on property value rather than brokers’ fees, and the facilitation of open dialogue—resonate with clients. Lastly, in exploring competitor messaging, we noticed that most large real estate brokerage firms are talking about their size and breadth of service instead of what clients truly care about—results.

Based on these findings and a series of collaborative workshops with Sperry Van Ness, we developed a brand positioning statement rooted in the idea that the company is “Built for Better Results.” Based on the ideas embedded in the positioning statement, we went on to develop a streamlined identity architecture that more consistently supports the master brand, as well as training presentations and materials for over 1,000 Sperry Van Ness brokers throughout the world.

Result

The new brand position was launched at a national conference in January 2008 to over 1,000 Sperry Van Ness advisors. The company adopted “Built for Better Results” as a tagline and now includes copy from the positioning statement on the “About Us” section of their Web site.