OVERLOOK RIDGE DEVELOPMENT
Located in Little Falls, New York, the Overlook Ridge Development combines cutting-edge, sustainable living with world-class leadership education.
The Overlook Ridge Campus will be home to six newly developed townhomes that feature a variety of innovative green technologies, contributing to the campus’ zero-net energy status. It will be home to individuals looking for a change in the form of an innovative, uplifting and sustainable community.
This was a project I worked on as a part of Cornell University Sustainable Design, with the stakeholder David Casullo of Bates Communications. I was fortunate enough to be put in charge of marketing and public relations for the development, and over the course of sixteen weeks my team developed the following strategy and assets.
MARKET RESEARCH
Even though we started with rough information on the type of marketing materials the project would require, it was clear that we needed to have a solid background in every aspect of the project before we began. We delved into market research in four main categories: Little Falls history, Little Falls today, Bates Communications, and CUSD.
Little Falls is both the setting of the project and a significant portion of the target market of any promotional materials, so that was an obvious place to start. Eventually there will be a leadership institute on the site that will also need to be marketed. Even if the Bates name is not used at the institute, the ideas behind the training will be similar, so we wanted to know everything we could about the Bates philosophy. That way, the marketing from the units can transition seamlessly into that of the institute.
BRAND DESIGN
Once all the market research was done, we moved on to the enormous undertaking of defining the brand of Overlook Ridge. We wanted to have a solid idea of the brand before we started writing any copy or assets. If the brand is clear and specific, without being too myopic, then it can be used as a starting point for marketing for years to come. After many hours of discussion, the brand finally began to take shape.
The brand footprint begins with the core values of environmental sustainability, education, and community. Those three pillars are so relevant to business culture today, that they are seen in a lot of platforms, and so it is the personality that will make Overlook’s brand individual. The four personality descriptors we decided on are: leader, innovative, uplifting, and connected. The last descriptor, connected, is arguably the most important. There should be a connection between Overlook Ridge and the town, between the current residents and future renters, between the modern brand image and the history it stems from. All the personality and the core values can be distilled down into the new brand footprint:
A culture of learning and sustainability that uplifts the entire community
Overlook Ridge Development can really be segmented into several “products,” all of which are smoothly connected, but each of which has a different target market. At this time, since our architects were working on the unit design for the rentals, it made sense to cater our work to the future homeowners. With that in mind, our product position was the following:
BRAND NAME: Overlook Ridge
TARGET MARKET: Down-sizers and Millennials
FRAME OF REFERENCE: Neighborhood, Leadership
BENEFITS: Improved community relations, improved education, improved environmental sustainability, aesthetic beauty of the surroundings
To summarize all that info into a product positioning statement for the new marketing:
To homeowners looking for a change, Overlook Ridge is the forward thinking community that will elevate their lives because we care about Little Falls.
The last piece, “because we care about Little Falls,” is an extremely important part of the statement. It reminds us that this is not a big corporation coming to take over the town and exploit its charm for money. Everyone involved in the project is invested in the people and history of the place, and seeks first and foremost to improve the area. With these long-term givens, we are confident that the branding will carry Overlook Ridge through the next few stages of marketing.
In addition to those long term givens, we chose an initial visual brand. Most of the images we had taken of the land itself, would be used for renderings and appear in a lot of our materials. For that reason, we pulled colors that complemented each other and the natural Mohawk Valley landscape. We chose a font set that we liked and wanted to work with, but also would be easily available to amateur editors since we were trying to make future manipulation of our work as easy as possible.
WEBSITE
While Overlook Ridge had a website already, it was outdated and difficult to update. We opted to start over with a new site that could pave the way for a multi-faceted web presence.
UX DESIGN
We thought about the website in terms of two user stories: new users who are exploring the site and returning users who know exactly what they want to access. The site needed to be graphically interesting enough to encourage a new user to spend a lot of time there. However, it is also important that users who know what they want to see don’t get bogged down and frustrated. For instance, we want future tenants to be able to get to a “pay your rent” section with one click.
The audience will include people who are less technologically savvy, so we wanted to have a menu that functioned in a very traditional, drop-down way. After thinking about the brand, we decided on action verbs to describe the five main sections of the site, and designed the hierarchy from there.
Along with that traditional navigation bar, we wanted the rest of the site to be a more modern scrolling format with lots of images and dynamic call-to-action buttons that cater to the browsing segment of our target audience.
UI DESIGN
When designing the actual interface, we were very aware of the fact that the company we were working with had not updated their website in more than ten years. We wanted it to be as simple as possible to update over the next few years. We wanted a wysiwyg site that even a high school intern could type new text into.
LAUNCH EVENT
The final bit of public relations work was a community launch event. This involved creating a flier for the stakeholders to distribute, a presentation for the actual event, and a leaflet for the guests to take home with them. The event was really a test for us to see if we had a marketing mix that was strong enough that it could be manipulated into good materials in the future. Fortunately, it was a resounding success.
