How Underpinnings Also Apply to AEC Marketing
We enter buildings of all kinds every day without questioning whether they will hold up. Apart from a natural disaster, we trust that they will...
Image credit: Grant Robison Photography
I was chatting with a friend the other day and the word “underpinning” came up. We were talking about it from the AEC definition of the word: a solid foundation laid below ground level to support or strengthen a building. We enter buildings of all kinds every day without questioning whether they will hold up. Apart from a natural disaster, we trust that they will and, by extension, we’re trusting the team that designed and built them. We don’t realize it. We don’t articulate it. But that’s what we’re doing.
What we also often don’t realize, is that there’s another definition of underpinning that applies to AEC marketing as well: a set of ideas, motives, or devices that justify or form the basis for something. This is our approach to all marketing, PR, BD, and proposal development—we create the set of ideas, motives, and/or devices that form the basis of why our clients are in business and why they do what they do. By beginning this way, we’re building the foundation that generates every copywriting and graphic component that happens thereafter. How many AEC firms do this? We ask the question because when we’re hired to review and help with marketing materials, they generally lack cohesiveness. The writing is often inconsistent and reads like it’s coming from several different people. The photos fail to tell a project’s story, and the graphics are often outdated and/or aren’t combined with any type of design standards, leading to more inconsistency. When we fail to begin with a process of discovery that leads to a foundation, everything crumbles.
The good news is, it’s never too late.
When architects begin the design process, they start by understanding the client, users, site (with all its challenges and opportunities), neighborhood, region, community, and more. All of this contributes to a project’s success. Likewise, when we work with our clients, whether on branding, website development, proposals, or the myriad other services we provide we begin with our own process of discovery. We ask numerous questions that help us understand not only our clients, but their clients as well. We ask about their pain points and what makes them unique. We ask what hasn’t been working and what they hope to achieve as we redo their materials. We set writing and design standards so that everyone in the company also delivers a clear, consistent message. We would no sooner sell a client some snappy copy with a jazzy design simply because “we like it,” any more than a design team would place a window in a certain location because “it looks better there.”
The bonus to all of this (and we love bonuses, don’t we?) is that once you invest in creating this foundation, everything else falls into place.
Underpinning—who knew one word could be the catalyst for success? It’s like that sometimes, so simple. Deconstructed Workshops’ foundation is helping our clients realize their foundation.
