Project Overview

Lendlease is a global company, with an Australian heritage and local expertise across the core markets of Australia, Asia, the Americas and Europe. We love cities and at Lendlease we’re experts at creating the best places through Urban Regeneration. Cities are constantly evolving and facing new challenges as their populations grow. Urban Regeneration allows us to help cities solve these challenges by revitalising unused and underutilised spaces and turning them into places people want to live, work and play in.

Formerly, the Lendlease brand was represented through Urban Regeneration projects by a single logo, often placed on the back of a brochure. Specifically, Apartments projects within Urban Regeneration each carried their own creative toolkit, creating equity for themselves with little association with the Lendlease brand.
This approach resulted in inconsistent, costly and time-consuming application. Because of the diversity of projects a solution was created, ensuring each project brand and its products had the collateral to support its marketing needs, in turn building equity for both project and Lendlease brands.
Houston Group were engaged to create a flexible yet unifying solution to ‘tell and sell’ Lendlease’s broader offer, whilst being sympathetic to the nuances and uniqueness of each project.

Organisation

Lendlease

 

Project Brief

The Urban Regeneration business had a clear vision to align brand and communication materials to better position the broader Apartments offer, and to build greater equity into their project brands. Beginning with a need to bolster their Apartments marketing collateral, the brief grew into the creation of a clever and dynamic solution that could be applied to current and future projects, from the uber-urban offering of Melbourne Quarter to the premium views at Barangaroo.
In the Apartments category there is a high degree of product stretch, from mass-market, to premium, to ultra-premium, influenced by a range of factors including segmentation, specialisation, location and more. To allow for this stretch, a toolkit was introduced to work for each varying project and product brand.
The challenge was set: take the current range of collateral which had no brand consistency, common graphic language or story, and emphasise the Lendlease brand presence, whilst allowing enough flexibility to express the specialties and nuances of each product.

Project Innovation/Need

Getting the balance between consistency and flexibility right was crucial in creating a solution that was easy to implement, graphically consistent and sympathetic to the diverse nature of Lendlease Apartments projects.

The solution needed to:
a) Provide consistency across Apartment projects brand
b) ‘Tell and sell’ the Lendlease story clearly and consistently
c) Elevate the suite of communications across the Apartments business unit, resulting in a consistently
strong output
d) Unite projects to build equity into the Lendlease masterbrand
e) Build equity for each project brand (no matter how new) through elevated communications and consistent
customer journey from project to project

Design Challenge

Instead of rolling out a ‘one size fits all’ toolkit, a series of potential approaches were created and tested on an existing project. After several rounds of finessing, a simple and effective three-part system was created.

1. Place identity: Because of the uniqueness of each project, each place was granted its own identity, inspired by the intricacies of the place and the surrounding area.

2. Product toolbox: This graphic language was based on the Lendlease masterbrand (introduced as part of a rebrand in 2015). A range of assets including a new premium font, graphic language and devices and an extended colour palette were introduced. These are complementary to the existing Lendlease group brand, but allow design flexibility for each product.

3. Assets: A family of assets and templates was introduced to be used by various agencies and third parties as the basis for collateral design. These demonstrate flexibility in the application of copy, photography, renders and illustrations, whilst providing a framework for the product narrative and a ‘shopping list’ of assets required for each project. In addition, briefs were developed for production to ensure consistency in size, format, stocks, printing techniques and more.

Effectiveness

Through the brand strategy and design response, individual Apartment projects are now fully leveraging the equity created by the Lendlease brand, which is already being recognised by customers. The new assets and collateral has resulted in greater design and production efficiencies, as well as reducing internal review processes and subjectivity with regard to design and content.

The new brand toolkit and communication materials were implemented ahead of a busy period for Lendlease, with the successful launch of four major Apartment projects in the space of four months. The roll-out featured across multiple domestic and international marketing campaigns and contributed significantly to record enquiry and sales numbers for the business.

Additionally, brand consistency across marketing collateral and advertising has generated greater awareness
of the broader Lendlease Apartments and Urban Regeneration portfolios, facilitating cross-selling opportunities for teams. The solution is now being developed and delivered for other asset classes within Urban Regeneration and is being considered for other work globally.

Finally, this improved approach has allowed teams to focus further on content and communication strategy, improving their ability to both leverage and communicate Lendlease’s competitive advantage as a group, and within specific Apartment projects.