< back Quantity surveying isn’t quite as glamorous as the music business. It’s not a normal career choice for the trendy designer types and you rarely see many films or TV series based on the experiences of party wall experts or project managers. But there’s a lot of money in property and it’s the surveyors who add it all up. And they need marketing just as much as anyone else. Competition for projects is fierce: the winners tend to be those who manage the client relationships, as well as the building works themselves. Traditionally, as is the case with many professional firms, marketing was unheard of or at best was delegated to a partner well past his sell by date and with a budget less than that for office cakes on someone’s birthday. But that might be a mistaken view given that for many firms, whether they realised it or not, corporate entertaining has been and should be an important part of the marketing function, indeed for many businesses it still is the most effective. The traditional approach has been to wine and dine the clients at fancy restaurants or to entertain them in small groups at sporting events - and, by and large, this corporate hospitality still works well. However RLF, a QS firm with seven UK offices, noticed that the impact of their entertaining was having a diminishing return not least as all their competitors were offering similar tables and tickets; indeed it wasn’t uncommon to see the guest you had entertained on the Thursday sitting next to your rival for the Friday at Lords/Wimbledon/Ascot. The temptation with most marketing communications is to spend more if they’re not working hard enough however you quickly reach the point where it becomes uneconomic – this is very true of entertaining as many businesses can testify. Instead the answer can be found by being more creative and the most creative marketing of all is that which truly understands and appeals to the target audience. In RLF’s case the ‘target audience’ was easy to identify: project managers within major corporations are almost all male, aged 30-50, white, middle class and well educated and they tend to think that that most QS firms are pretty much the same, so they give their business to the firms with whom they had the best relationship. The challenge lay in what RLF wanted these project managers to think and do: to recognise RLF as somehow different and therefore worth trying. But how? One of my favourite quotes of all time is “don’t tell me you’re funny, make me laugh” – and it was clear that if RLF were truly different then they should act accordingly. Their difference should be self-evident. So, rather than having a small event for a dozen people, they hired out the Science Museum for an evening and invited 500 current and prospective clients to the James Bond exhibition. On arrival, ‘Bond girls’ greeted the guests with large Vodka Martinis, shaken not stirred, and guided them on a tour of the exhibits. By midnight the behaviour of these rather straight-laced characters had changed somewhat and there was fierce rivalry to be photographed in the DB5 with a bevy of bikini-clad beauties! It worked a treat. RLF secured several major contracts within a week of this hospitality as a consequence of several factors. Firstly, the scale of the event said loudly, ‘RLF are major players’. The presence of competitors together, in the same room, aided rather than hindered events. The opportunity for RLF partners and senior managers to directly interact with new prospects was invaluable and the subsequent follow up with the mailing of photographs (not a hint of blackmail!) reminded guests how much fun they’d had – let’s face it, do you know a single bloke aged 30-50 who doesn’t like James Bond? Quite simply, RLF made their marketing work harder and smarter by using a tried and trusted method, corporate hospitality, but in a much more innovative and creative way achieving more bang for their buck in the process. Or is that, more money for their penny?! Peter Knight is chairman of Phoenix. His best-selling book, ‘HEMP: Highly Effective Marketing Plans’ is available in 11 languages, including plain English. If you’re a real business and you’ve come up with a stunning marketing plan, or you want help, Peter would love to hear from you. Contact pk@phoenixplc.com
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