Project
ExtraCare
Harrison Carloss has been its marketing partner since the creation of its first retirement village over 20 years ago–working as an extension of the inhouse team.
This ambitious organisation has a consistent track-record of innovation and an appetite for doing things differently. From day one it was clear that we’d need to think outside the box to deliver ExtraCare’s vision and a conventional property marketing approach would not suffice. Our challenge was to help achieve planning permission, galvanise local community support and then ensure that more than 75% of properties were sold off-plan before a village officially opened.
This defied a number of conventions within the housing, property and care sectors, which traditionally focused on above the line advertising and promotion.
We like to think that this is a ‘social’ approach in action before social media was invented. We built a dialogue with customers early on, engaging them with an inspirational proposition that focused on independent, healthy and active lifestyle benefits, rather than bricks and mortar. It enabled customers to shape and influence the end product and generated buy-in along the way.
The approach reflected the lifestyle proposition in all aspects of the marketing mix and featured the voice of real residents as the most persuasive tool in building trust and confidence.
A cultivated database.
Of over 2,000 people.
We developed and cultivated a database of over 2,000 people interested in moving to each retirement village.
We built a vibrant community of older people interested in the village lifestyle before properties were released for sale. We helped ExtraCare sell the majority of the village properties off plan and filled rental apartments before the village opened its doors,. We then continued to provide support to ensure the rest of the village was quickly sold out.
I have worked with the Agency for over 20 years and they made a real difference to my work and helped propel the organisation to be a market leader.
