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The property management industry in London is extremely competitive. In an environment of almost infinite competition, Albany Residential caters to customers who are concerned about quality and great service.
Albany had been particularly careful to not overextend their capabilities by taking on too much work too quickly, and compromising their quality service. However, as needs must, the company needed to expand at a controlled rate. With numerous satisfied customers, repeat business and referrals, maintaining the existing scale was likely to become problematic in the long term.

With the volume of competition in the property management marketplace, the challenge was to effectively communicate Albany 's genuine quality commitment, where every competing company stated a similar quality commitment and generally didn't deliver. "Quality" was a term apparently wearing fairly thin.
Expansion is good news - if it is managed correctly. Expanding into inappropriate markets in conflict with your underlying principles can be disastrous. With the myriad of quality messages and evidence in favour of the company, none were being utilised. Our original remit was to create a striking new corporate identity which communicated the company's quality commitment, and which steered the company back on market track.
In addition to the brand visuals, the existing website was lacklustre and did not communicate the correct message to potential customers. Difficult to use, and graphically nondescript, it was communicating a wrong message. Subsequently, the wrong market was being targeted, inhibiting growth in the right direction.

- A brief consultancy identified the need to communicate the correct message in an effective way, to the correct market demographic
- Thought was given to competition in the marketplace, their visual identities, and how we might produce a visual brand which "stood out from the crowd"
- The brand had to be visually noticeable on "For Sale" boards in the target area
- A clean, professional website was created, offering the right signals and messages

"We met up with Firm about two years ago, at a time when we were at the point of re-branding our business. We already had an "adequate" website but needed something much more than this. We were conscious that we wanted to be perceived as setting ourselves apart from the usual operators in the residential lettings sector. We knew that we had a superior service from the feed back from our clients and having been a user of letting agents ourselves in the past we knew that we were offering a quality service. This was the message that we needed to convey.
Although the initial terms of reference with Firm extended simply to a new website we soon realised with input from Firm that a more "root and branch" approach would be of greater benefit. After consideration we commissioned Firm to come up with a new Logo, new website, a full suite of business stationary and our agency boards.
As a result our visual presentation hung together as a single consistent unit for the first time. The increase in business was tangible within a short period of time and the positive impetus that this created carried over in to relocating our business, hiring additional staff and a marked increase in the volume of work.
We have maintained close touch with Firm and the level of ongoing support and advice has been productive, insightful and objective. The whole experience of dealing with Firm has been invaluable."
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