Pride is more powerful than marketing

The key to building trust with your market is to embrace some principles of we’ve been calling ‘customer-led marketing’, where emphasis on “pride over promise” – people learning from people, community development and activation, B2C collaboration – is at least equal to, if not greater than, your investments in traditional forms of property marketing.

So, what does this actually look like in practical terms? At Frasers Property Australia, the first step meant breaking down the silos that have typically tended to exist between the Development, Marketing, and Community Engagement teams.

Working as multi-disciplinary networks that share the tasks of ideation and execution instead of discrete functions within a linear supply chain, this approach has allowed us to work as one team toward building places that our residents can be proud to call home.

From there, we set about establishing a framework for this approach, and developed four discrete channels where we quite literally allow our customers to do the talking. All of these lead to interactions which become the new metric in the traditional sales funnel.

Programmatic interactions

This is about creating programs which actively encourage (and incentivise) customers to share their views about our communities with family and friends. The key vehicle for this within our business is Prosperity; our customer care and loyalty program.

While Prosperity has always had referral bonuses for referring friends and family – nothing all that new there – we recently launched Prosperity Share; a promotional program which in limited periods allow existing customers to offer the benefits of Prosperity membership (including the opportunity to buy in-demand property before it’s released to market) to family and friends. A recent pilot delivered 34 unconditional sales amounting to around $20 million in revenue. Most importantly, initiatives like this help us to create neighbourhoods where people already know their neighbours – building capacity into our communities.

Architected interactions

We mean this literally. Since 2016, we’ve spent considerably more time, energy and money trying to include buildings and public spaces that can draw people from outside the community to come and discover it and meet community members. Most importantly we’ve been working to deliver these places early in the lifecycle of the development.

At Life, Point Cook it was Leap Frog Park complete with a two-story high frog that kids could explore and learn from, delivered with the first stages of completed land lots. And at Ed.Square it meant a big scale café within our sales centre, desperately needed in the area and a hit from day one.

Planned interactions

This is where traditional community events – if well planned – can double as marketing opportunities. Since the inception of the Fairwater community in Sydney’s Blacktown, a number of events held on the estate have seen residents from a diverse array of backgrounds bring and share food they’ve prepared themselves with their friends and neighbours. It’s not uncommon for them to bring friends or family along to literally share a meal in the community that they may be interested in.

The joy of cooking for each other and sharing different cuisines from around the world resulted in the creation of a community group of food lovers who call themselves the Fairwater Foodies. So passionate is their interest in food, that this year the group, assisted by our Community Development Manager, is bringing out their own self-published cookbook, Fairwater Foodies, which of course will tell the story of this community to a wider audience with barely any involvement from Frasers Property.

Un-planned interactions

Since the beginning of time word of mouth has been the most powerful way to market and sell because it revolves around trust and relationships. For the most part, we can’t see these interactions but we know they happen because on some projects we’re now hitting 30% in referral sales. Every now and then though, we get a glimpse. Recently at Brookhaven in Queensland, a young couple from NSW was in the sales centre, unsure about where to put down roots in Queensland.

Like many of our Sales Centres, Brookhaven has a small but vibrant cafe, providing an environment for current residents, future residents, and so often the tradies who are actually building our property to hang out and interact. It is quite a thrill to see a conversation spark up between a customer, the plumber who is fitting their kitchen sink, and a prospective customer. It sounds far-fetched but I can assure you it happens.

On this particular day the young couple were clearly interested but not quite convinced. Our sales agent, with full confidence, took them to the cafe and introduced them to some existing residents and said “tell them what you think”. Within minutes they were talking about the tool-share Facebook group, the best kids play areas, the best supermarket in the area... the list goes on. Needless to say they decided to join our community.

The results speak for themselves. The absolutely key thing about this approach is to shake off the cynicism that typically comes over people when they think about developer marketing.

The fact is, this is win-win-win. We get the benefit of a more efficient marketing program and the investments we make start to bias initiatives which build community capacity over glossy brochures. Our future customers get a more authentic introduction to our projects, helping them to make a more informed choice. And our existing residents get a holistic approach to community development and begin to build community capacity which has a much better chance of enduring once we complete the project.

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We acknowledge and thank our consultancy partner BE Counsel, and our Community Development Managers Sian Buchanan, Jessica Clark, Billy Cotsis, Karen Woo, Julia Celinski and Michelle Mrzyglocki.