It's a joy to come home.
With these words, we landed on an emotional truth that we carried with Lennar over our three year retainer. We were approached to help their brand out. Our positioning was simple: home buying is one of the most emotional decisions a person will ever make. Lennar takes the stress of haggling and hidden costs out, of making removing difficult family decisions and reintroducing the joy of transforming your life through a new home.
As one of the biggest homebuilders in America, Lennar has a distinctly unique product offering: and all-inclusive price, that includes style and upgrades at one price. They also had a desire to have some of their corporate culture and differentiator as a home builder carry through into their work. The only problem is that all homebuilders focus on stats and pricing and square footage.
We spent our time on the retainer humanizing the brand. Refreshing their brand guidelines, crafting consistency to messaging and tone of voice and refining their core product positioning for consumers. We completely overhauled the website around this focus and worked with divisions on bringing the next generation of home buyers together with their support staff on the ground.
OF RECORD
BRINGING JOY TO HOME BUYING
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 200+ page templates supported by 45+ design patterns.
This seems like a lot, but Lennar.com is thousands of pages across hundreds of communities nationwide.
Our work with Lennar was primarily grouped into five components: brand, Everything's Included, Next Gen, audience segments and the website. Other initiatives were put on hold before implementation, though research and user experience work ended up informing our decisions. There was also a bunch of rando stuff, of course - it's a retainer after all.
We humanized the brand positioning by typography, photo decisions and tone of voice. We used patterns to break up some of the stark simplicity of the palette. Nipped and tucked a few other things. We told a story with our video opportunities instead of pushing products.
We found with Next Gen, a home product that integrated a main living space with a secondary home, Lennar had traditionally focused on the cost savings, instead of the very real human factors at play - the aging parent who wouldn't have to move into a nursing home, the learning disabled children. The extended families that would choose to have this lifestyle. It wasn't about the cost savings for these people. It was the small opportunities they were given to share. So we shot real people, in their real homes, and told their stories. Sure, they're part documentary, but they're powerful. People actually cry after living in a Next Gen home.
We focused on the lifestyle of Active Adult communities. The interweaving of opportunity to bond and participate with the dignity of independent homes. We crafted a narrative that intersected these pieces.
We reframed Everything's Included - their product of no haggling into a brand promise.
We pitched and redesigned their website around the values of their brand: to make people feel like buying a home should be a joyous, stress-free experience. The site was a warren of inter-related, parallel micro-sites, brochure and direct-focused content.
The resulting website simplifies the overall structure, removes indecision, and allows for users to have their decisions saved and highlights those decisions subtley on future pages. We made it mobile, and used progressive display to keep the owner in control. And when they're ready, the site is ready to guide them to the next step.
In the end, we did what we set out to do with Lennar:
Make them human again.