Successful Strategy for Home Builder Brand Refresh for Thomas James Homes

Every home builder and real estate development company should evolve and respond to market trends, business expansion, shifting values, customer expectations and more. The best way to convey these shifts to your audience is with an effective and thoughtful brand refresh that sharpens your company messaging and refines your visual identity by adjusting or introducing new elements.

Successful real estate development and home building companies are no stranger to reinventing their brand and investing in marketing that strongly resonates with their audience. Brands that fail to do so face the consequences of losing their competitive advantage over time. A brand refresh is a powerful way to reignite interest with your targeted audience, highlight your unique differentiators and shape the course of your company’s future.

Let’s explore how we refreshed the Thomas James Homes brand with a memorable brand promise and a new graphic identity.

Background

Thomas James Homes is a renowned custom home replacement builder. Over the past decade, the builder has completed over 800 to date — becoming one of the nation’s largest, single-lot new home replacement builders. Thomas James Homes currently builds in southern and northern California, Pacific Northwest and Colorado.

At its core, Thomas James Homes recognizes that the “right” home is different for everyone and offers a completely new kind of custom home building experience to meet every buyer’s needs. To accommodate their buyers’ unique tastes, Thomas James Homes provides over 35 different home sizes, styles and elevations. Through thoughtful consideration and smart solutions, Thomas James Homes delivers beautiful new homes that serve buyer lifestyles and are placed in the exact neighborhoods where they want to live.

Rather than serving a single market with a single need, Thomas James Homes recognizes three groups with different needs that has led to three distinct solutions. For buyers who enjoy where they live but want more from their homes, they can design and build their dream home on their existing homesite. For homeowners who desire a new home and a new community, Thomas James Homes offers a range of pre-construction to move-in-ready homes located within sought-after neighborhoods offering home buyers options to customize their interior selections. Lastly, buyers looking for a quick transition can select a move-in-ready showcase home available for immediate occupancy.

Target Audience

Thomas James Homes wanted to introduce its brand to buyers in new markets. The brand’s ideal target audience was made up of affluent buyers seeking new homes in established, sought-after neighborhoods. The locations they wanted to target included West Los Angeles, Northern California and Seattle.

Brand Challenge

When the Milesbrand team began working with Thomas James Homes, the builder was expanding into new residential markets. Thomas James Homes wanted to fuel their growth by revitalizing its branding to attract new attention. The builder needed a total brand refresh from their logo and graphic identity to their website, collateral, signage, digital assets and more.

Thomas James Homes also needed a fresh brand promise that could articulate their unique guarantee to their buyers. Thomas James Homes is dedicated to delivering homes with everything buyers want and need including suitable lifestyle features and a location they love. Our goal was to convey the exceptional experience homebuyers can expect when they choose a Thomas James home.

Key Insight

Most homebuyers want the same things – a gorgeous home placed in the right location that seamlessly suits their lifestyle and matches their authentic style. Thomas James Homes offers both surprise and delight to their customers by giving them the best of everything. Buyers enjoy a brand-new home filled with modern design delights in the exact neighborhood they want to live in.

Thomas James Homes believes finding or creating a new home should be a joyful milestone, and they are devoted to eliminating the stress and frustration of homebuilding and buying that deters that happiness. Whether buyers love where they live or not, Thomas James Homes offers a range of solutions that allows buyers to create the right home and choose their perfect location – this brand is all about providing the perfect home fit!

Brand Strategy

Explaining the Thomas James process of building new, single-family homes one scattered lot at a time seemed complex. Instead, we planned to simplify the idea and transform their offer into a brand promise that delivers exactly what people want, but don’t know exists. The new Thomas James brand promise became, “The Right Home, Right Where You Want It.”

Building a brand-new home and finding the best locations are typically the top priorities of most homebuyers. With this in mind, we wanted to position Thomas James Homes as a brand that recognized those buyer concerns and exceeded expectations by delivering homes and locations that are just right.

Some of the taglines we used throughout Thomas James Homes’ website to share the brand’s distinctive homebuilding experience included:

• Same Address, New Home
• Discover the Thomas James Homes solution that’s right for you.
• A completely new kind of custom homebuilding experience.

Tactics

To provide the brand with a total refresh, we started with creating a cohesive graphic identity that conveyed the brand’s luxurious homes and distinctive homebuilding offer. To build excitement about new Thomas James homes, build awareness and continuously incorporate the builder’s new branding, we created a branded fence wrap to surround new homes under construction.

Our team also established a comprehensive brand style guide as well as collateral templates to ensure all elements of Thomas James Homes branding were consistent and unified. We used modern design elements and a simplistic, yet elegant color palette of black and white. We designed a new logo for Thomas James Homes showcasing a sophisticated, circular emblem that incorporates the brand name and the Thomas James signature initials.

To visually share the brand and its home design, we created several marketing components that could be distributed to several of the builder’s audiences. We developed both a print and digital brochure for buyers, as well as a digital brochure targeted at Realtors to grow the builder’s partnership program. We designed attention-grabbing eblasts comprised of compelling imagery and intriguing copy that further explained brand aspects that make up the Thomas James Homes difference. We also created a series of videos featuring insight from the brand’s leadership, homeowners and partners on where they build, what they build, how they build, their Realtor partnership, homeowner stories, Realtor stories and the Thomas James culture.

Our team also updated the brand’s online presence by designing a new website that incorporated the Thomas James Homes refreshed graphic identity and brand promise. To drive strong traffic to the home builder website, we developed a paid search landing page to draw in buyers and generate greater lead conversions.

Results

From the beginning, graphic continuity was central to the brand refresh and acted as the driving force behind Thomas James Homes’ comprehensive branding and marketing strategy. Our strategy helped the builder produce 91 sales through October 2019 generating over $350 million in revenue and the company is now successfully established in 5 regions across the Western U.S.

Our fantastic graphic continuity and strong creative also allowed us to earn recognition at The Nationals awards. The brochure we created for Thomas James Homes received the Gold Award for Best Builder Brochure.

Create the Right Brand that Achieves the Right Results with Milesbrand

What do your buyers need and how does your brand deliver that? Now is the best time to ask this question to start creating the best brand fit that showcases your value and resonates with your buyers.

At Milesbrand, we’re in the business of creating value for our clients. We’ll help you identify and communicate your Brand DNA—the most compelling differentiation that sets you apart from the competition. Talk to our team today to learn how to get started creating the right brand that earns the right results!