Is Brandscaping for You? 

Five Tests To See If Branding Your Office Will Grow Your Business

You’ve heard the buzz. Marketers are paying more and more attention to the “last mile problem” of consumer influence—the image and messages a prospect experiences when they visit a company’s office. An entirely new marketing discipline is emerging to address this problem. It goes by several names: branded environments, lobby makeovers, and brandscaping are the most common.

At its essence, the discipline of branded environments is about transforming the beige, standard-issue business office into a compelling visual argument for what is special about a company.

It can be a smart, powerful tool for some companies, but it may not work for everyone. How do you determine if this is a valid tool for growing your business, as opposed to an ego-stroking vanity piece? Here are five tests to see if a lobby makeover can work for you. If any one of these apply, you may need to earmark funds for brandscaping in the future.

Test #1: Do your customers or prospects visit your facility?

If your audience comes to you, then your office space is the clearest (i.e., least cluttered) opportunity you have for messaging. Traditional marketing happens “out there,” away from your space, in the overcrowded mix of messages that bombard your prospect. It takes increasingly more energy to break through the clutter and gain attention. Often, even when you succeed in gaining their attention, it is at a time when your prospect is not in a position to act.

When a prospect is in your facility you have a controlled opportunity to influence them, at a time when they are in a position to act. You can filter out all the clutter and tell them what you do best. It’s the most concentrated opportunity you have to start a conversation on your terms.

Test #2: Do you need to make your mission, vision and values clear to people that visit you?

This one is especially important in not-for-profit organizations, but it can apply more broadly. Non-profits battle public misunderstanding of their purpose, well-meaning volunteers who are sometimes under-trained, and donor fatigue. If you have non-customer constituents—like politicians, reporters, volunteers, or donors—who need to be reminded of what your organization exists to do, then your space can help you tell your story.

Specific applications that work well include:

• Focus walls with logos and mission statements provide a great backdrop for photos with visiting VIPs
• A success story writ large can be particularly useful in helping influencers understand the impact of your work
• A well-chosen testimonial, or large format photographs, can remind donors of why their help is needed
• Value statements and guiding principles etched into the walls can help with keeping a large volunteer staff on mission

With thoughtful planning, all of these elements can be worked into a lobby makeover at a reasonable cost.

Test #3: Do you need your employees to be ambassadors of your brand?

Any employee can connect with prospects and customers, and instantly become a front-line representative of your brand. If this interaction is important to you, then using your environment to communicate how you want customers to be treated and how the brand should be presented could be critical.

Your office space can become an immersive learning environment, where you reinforce what makes you different, and imprint your values on your culture. This treatment has the effect of calling out the best your team has to offer, and it encourages them that you value their participation enough to invest in them.

Test #4: Are you growing rapidly?

Rapid growth brings its own unique challenges. Often you are adding new people to the team in a constant stream, and the new blood can swamp the carefully crafted culture that brought you the rapid growth in the first place.

Using your office environment to inculcate your values and identity can help the flood of new associates assimilate into your culture, instead of swamping it. It also serves to focus other constituents (e.g., vendors and shareholders) who may need to be reminded of why your organization is different and how that difference contributes to your success.

Test #5: Are you trying to sell your business or raise a round of financing?

The same principle that leads people to put a fresh coat of paint on a house they’re about to put on the market, or to detail a car that they’re about to sell, applies to businesses. Dressing up your lobby helps you put your best foot forward when you are trying to get the best price from a buyer.

A business with a clear identity, with values that are deeply ingrained into the culture, demonstrates that the founder has created an organization that can continue successfully without her or him. Using your space to communicate that identity accomplishes two things: 1) as mentioned earlier, it helps instill those attributes into the culture, which creates real value for a potential buyer; and 2) it visually demonstrates value to any buyer who does a site-visit.

These five tests can give you a quick perspective on whether environmental branding is a wise investment for achieving your goals. If any of these tests apply to you, then take a look around your space with fresh eyes. What message does your office interior communicate now? When a visitor has to wait in your lobby, do they immediately start looking through old magazines, or dig into their briefcase for something to do? If so, you’re missing an opportunity to engage and influence.

If you see that the message your office space communicates is a problem, then you’ve completed the first step to recovery—admitting you’ve got a problem is always the first step to recovery, right? The second step is a simple question: “What is the first comment or question I would like someone to ask me after they see my lobby?” Once you know the answer to that question, your brandscaping task is to find a way to make your environment evoke that question.