Selling a Brand with Fairytales
What is it?
A newcomer in the home renovation space wanted a way to distinguish themselves in a new market via social media. But this market is crowded with well-established competitors, so they needed a strong brand identity to lead the social strategy.
What I did
Pitched a strategy using “The 3 Little Pigs” as the basis for its concept.
Why the 3 Little Pigs?
Beyond the obvious similarities between home renovation and the 3 Little Pigs being home builders, the pigs also represent 3 different ideologies when it comes to home building:
The 1st pig makes a house of straw, because it’s cheap, fast and convenient.
The 2nd pig makes a house of sticks, because it’s functional and sensible.
The 3rd pig makes a house of bricks, because it was planning for the future and was willing to invest time and effort to create a dream house.
With these examples, it was easy to group competitors into the 1st pig and 2nd pig categories. This left the 3rd pig available for the newcomer to develop their strategy around.
Being the 3rd pig means hard work, dedication, and the patience to build a long-term dream home with a clear purpose.
Defining the Dream Home
There are many subjective definitions of a “dream home” so for the purposes of branding the home reno newcomer, I defined it like so:
A dream home is a home that supports your dreams
A dream home isn’t just “pretty” or “modern”; a dream home is one with features carefully designed to support your dreams, whatever they may be. For example:
Selling the Dream
To make an impact on social media, it was important to seed the concept of a dream home early in a would-be customer’s journey. This is likely to be in the discovery phase (Instagram and Facebook) and the Research phase (Pinterest).
It was recommended that the newcomer brand focus its content on these channels, with the key idea that a successful new home is not just functional but also brings out the best in you. To do that, you can create content based on success stories of customers who put such thought into their homes, or the home designers sharing their excitement about successful projects.
Either way, you should have happy stories with happy people talking about how this patiently designed home has improved lives. For example:
“My new apartment doesn’t have room for a garden, so I wanted a living room with the space and sunlight for indoor gardening.”
The concept of “dream home” also helps dictate the visual style of images, further differentiating them from the competition.
Why it works
Fairy tales are familiar to everybody. By using one as the basis for a brand’s concept, it becomes much easier for everyone on the team (and future newcomers) to quickly understand what the brand is about and how they need to communicate these ideals.
