Reinforcing Core Values and Building Customer Loyalty: The Role of Brand Purpose in A/E/C Marketing

What Is Brand Purpose?

Brand purpose is essential in our firms’ identity and marketing strategies and how our clients learn to understand our products and services in relation to their needs and values. To understand brand purpose, we must first understand what our intent is. What are we trying to accomplish by marketing our services? In the A/E/C industry, this could be several things – we could want to complete construction on a major international airport, build prominence with our local government clients by assisting them with their safety, sustainability, and master planning goals for engineering projects, or we could want to build a strong portfolio of architecture experience to strengthen customer relationships and attract top employees.

But why do we want to do these things? This is where brand purpose comes in – the purpose or justification of why we market the services we do. What are our values that influence our decisions and drive us to provide these services? This is imperative to establish our brand identity and how we want to approach our relationships with our customers. When discussing the A/E/C industry, our purpose is of critical importance considering our limitations regarding traditional business development and advertising strategies. We need our clients to fully buy in to our brand purpose and believe in it, therefore we as a firm need to believe in our values and live them every day. We want every interaction and project with our clients to reinforce this purpose to them and show them who we are and what we value.

Building Brand Purpose

Once we have established what these values – the “why” – are, it is important that we get buy-in from our firm’s top leadership and that individuals in those positions are able to embody these core values to all employees and understand why we have these beliefs and are able to effectively communicate this to our clients. This brand purpose is more than just an empty promise or mission statement, this purpose should be used to drive policies and practices internally, which then can resonate with our clients based on their interaction with us. This should be clearly communicated to all involved – from junior staff to leadership to our most important clients. Our brand purpose should drive the projects we go after, the way we interact with our clients, and how we deliver our projects. This often starts long before marketers are preparing a proposal – these principles drive our internal policies which will influence our approach to our marketing strategies and even how employees view themselves in relation to the overall firm goals and how they play a part in them.

Incorporating Brand Purpose Into Marketing Materials

We need to be creative in how we approach advertising and visibility strategies in the A/E/C industry so that we can reach our target audience while adhering to the guidelines set forth by government restrictions. Brand purpose is a core component of marketing in this industry as it is our most consistent form of “advertising” we can provide to our clients. Our clients need to internalize our purpose to the point that they know when we submit a proposal that we will live up to our values. We need to remind them, in every proposal and every deliverable, of what our values are and how we have embodied them in the past. We also need to understand in this industry that potential new clients may not be familiar with our values and our purpose, and it may take time to demonstrate this for them. We need to be prepared to show them, strategically and repeatedly, who we are and what we stand for before they are willing to award us work and let us prove to them what our brand purpose is.

With so many options available for consulting firms, and the ease with which clients can find information on our firm as well as our competitors, it is important to have a clearly established brand purpose to reinforce our existing relationships, and to use as leverage while building new relationships. Working alongside leadership, A/E/C marketers should be champions for our brand purpose and work to effectively demonstrate our values to our clients on a consistent basis.