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The Ugly Stick: How Not To Market A Condo
CULPRIT: The Star of Downtown marketing campaign and sales office
SCENE OF CRIME: Wellesley & Ontario (edge of Cabbagetown and St. Jamestown)
SENTENCE: 7/10 whacks
With the rampant development of Toronto and the GTA over the last decade or so, Torontonians have become used to the ubiquitous condominium sales office in their neighbourhoods. Newspapers and alt-weeklies are smattered with ads featuring architectural renderings, floor plans and stock photos of alleged hipsters, heads thrown back in uncontrollable bliss for condo living.
Marketing an unbuilt condo is no small feat. Developers must be laser-focused on their audience, offering designs and amenities competitive with other towers scraping the sky. Companies like Tridel and Context spend millions on their sales offices, advertising campaigns and market research hoping to secure enough pre-sales to start building and making sometimes unattainable promises along the way. Condo marketing is all about flash and appealing to the covet instinct, and for a developer, the stakes are high.
This is why the marketing campaign for “The Star of Downtown” is so bizarre. Obviously, the quality of the sales materials or salespeople doesn’t necessarily indicate a poor development, nor are we insinuating that The Star of Downtown won’t be a well-built, neighbourhood-appropriate project. What’s shocking is how a multi-million dollar undertaking can employ such an amateurish marketing campaign.
Let’s start with the strange name and sales office (visible above). Condo developments often have themes, and in this case, Norstar/Willowfield Homes decided that a pseudo-art deco marquee theme would be appropriate for Cabbagetown. The sales office hoarding is meant to look like an old-time movie theatre, and the name “Star of Downtown” practically requires the use of jazz hands when uttered. Nothing says leafy streets and Victorian classic Cabbagetown homes more than Old Hollywood showbiz razzamatazz.
Now, perhaps the development is targeted to a different audience than the late-twentyish urbanite. In fact, the stock image used in their advertising is of a pearl-draped sophisticate, surely breezing past her doorman into a waiting limo only to be whisked-off to a Brandenberg concerto. This St. Jamestown socialite knows value, however, which is why the ads scream savings, savings, savings at zero percent mortgage financing! Some ads claim that buyers can save over $70K, others claim up to $50K in savings, and still others only proclaim $20K-worth of “free parking.” So, which is it?
The developer obviously assumes that the target audience never uses a computer, which is the only explanation for The Star of Downtown’s circa-1994 atrocious web presence. Behold:
Entitled “New Page 1” (as multiple pages on the site are), the website consists of poorly-tiled background scans of a flyer, it’s totally browser non-compliant, and it includes an overlong animated splash intro that never met a Times New Roman font it didn’t like. Certain pages are nothing but squished half-meg GIFs. We highly recommend that design educators take a look at the site’s source code for a class lesson on why just anyone shouldn’t be a web designer. But wait—it gets worse:
Aesthetic police, arrest that man! Aside from a mishmash of almost unreadable aliased fonts, the image is more compressed than the couch cushions at NAAFA.
We also award a D+ grade for proper grammar and capitalization. Not only is the sales office “friday closed sat & sun 12:00 – 6:00” but “Willowfield Homes one of the Norstar Group of Companies presents” as well.
So, whom to blame? Luckily, the print ads for Phase 1 unnecessarily proclaimed “Director of Sales and Marketing Mitch Markowitz” [sic]. Markowitz has actually been a real-estate veteran for a quarter of a century so he seems to be doing something right, entrusted with the sales campaigns for Independence Way and Harmony Village, among others. The old-school showbiz vibe starts to make sense when you find out that Markowitz is also a veteran of the Canadian entertainment industry, managing bands like Mandala in the 60s. Most memorably, he and his brother launched the legendary cult TV series The Hilarious House of Frightenstein, where Markowitz played the character of the mosquito and “Superhippy.”Whereas the extreme awesomeness of Frightenstein is totally undeniable, the Star of Downtown’s sales campaign is not. Granted, the print advertising has greatly improved for Phase 2 of the development even if the website and sales office remains moored in Hopeless Harbour. Woefully inappropriate for the neighbourhood the Star is set to inhabit, its web presence adds a detrimental perception to what is probably a perfectly fine building. Most of it can probably be explained by a single line in the site’s HTML code:
Is this representative of something you’d want to throw down a couple hundred large for? Part of buying from a developer is being aware of the smoke that will be blown-up one’s ass with lofty promises and rock-bottom maintenance fees. The Star of Downtown seems to do the opposite, leaving the casual condo shopper with a sense of lowered expectation. In a city competitively bombarded by slick, expensive marketing campaigns, it’s unfortunate that this development’s weakest link is at the customer’s first exposure.
The Ugly Stick is a series about Toronto’s urban design crimes. Also check out the previous article on the Yonge & Bloor obelisk. Suggestions for future Ugly Sticks can be sent to [email protected]. Image of Superhippy from The Hilarious House of Frightenstein tribute site.