Flashes of dim-lit affluent parties followed by montages of vast – badly rendered – green spaces and walkways. This is how the reel for most real estate commercials runs. It is very formulaic, but luxury doesn’t mix well. Or does it? One certain developer has been constantly at the forefront of experimental marketing with great success. Mountain View has always been the real estate developer pushing the envelope for the entire industry, and it pays off.

Mountain View, and its marketing partners, have been going beyond the average industry marketing efforts with outstanding media campaigns and experimental marketing. From employing humor appeal in commercials, to social marketing, and CSR, Mountain View’s marketing efforts have long been a cut above the rest. So, here we take a stab at a makeshift marketing case study to look at Mountain View’s special take on real estate marketing and why it works.

 

The Mountain View Approach: A Marketing Case Study

Real estate is a highly standardized industry with rampant risk-aversion mentality. Most developers seek out the best advertising agencies with very set goals and procedures. But Mountain View has been doing it differently and, in the process, proving the status quo to be inefficient at best.

Take for example their hulk campaign. TV commercials and a social media campaign launched together to make this unique campaign back in 2015. It’s a classic take on the humor appeal advertising approach that you can see various industries go for. This includes telecommunication, F&B, sanitary products, hardware, and anything besides the real estate Egyptian sector. But the truth is, it worked for real estate too.

This campaign’s main objective, unlike most of its’ industry, the main objective of this campaign was never to sell a house but rather to sell a brand. Branding was what this ad and campaign succeeded at doing. From a more general point of view, luxury goods require fairly heavy branding so there is little wonder the campaign succeeded. Unsurprisingly, it was well-received by audiences and critics as well.

But It’s Not Just Advertising

Another ad campaign from back in 2018 made use of celebrity endorsements. Since then we have seen a few more developers take this route as well -in digital ads and TV commercials- but before 2018 it was practically unheard of.

But it’s not all commercials. Mountain View also used outdoor advertising and small-scale guerrilla marketing, among other tactics, in their strategy over the years. And while it all sounds impressive, nothing was creatively new outside the world of real estate. It is all about Mountain View giving their advertising agency partners more freedom and being more experimental. When every single developer resorts to the same strategies over and over again, it eventually loses effectiveness. Case in point: large lifestyle-themed billboards for residential compounds are not nearly as useful as they once were.

Classic Advertising Is Not Dead, But It Is Dying

The run-of-the-mill luxury-focused ad is far from useless, of course. But, the more times people view them the less effective they become. Not only that, but the 10% of the industry competing for this declining attention space in the audience’s head years ago has now risen up to near 100% of the industry. So, a new form of advertising is sorely needed.

So. if there is a take away from this short marketing case study, it would be this; all in all, experimental tactics carry risk, but so do the “safe” ones. Mountain View’s efforts combined excellent copy with well-studied placements. Their digital marketing campaigns, outdoor campaigns, and series of commercials have been nothing but successful. But these efforts would have been lost if they were tossed in the sea of cliche billboards and the “high life” type commercials.