Appendix
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Journal
DATE PUBLISHED; 
19.4.2019
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3M

Are You In Control Of Your Marketing?

I wanted to understand how attitudes might be shifting in the industry as architects adopt modern, relevant marketing strategies for their firms.

The chart below comes from a survey I sent to 500 registered architects.

I asked them to rate on a scale how much they felt they had total control, some control or no control over all of the typical marketing outcomes within their firm.

Do bigger firms have a different feeling of control to smaller firms?

I was curious to know whether a firm’s perspective would change as their headcount grew.

The median firm size of the architecture firms I surveyed was four people including the director, so I have separated the data between firms with less than four, and four or more employees.

Do older firms have a different feeling of control to smaller firms?

I split the group into firms who were five less years old, and more than five years old.

The results were very similar when broken down by age, or headcount – with only a slight improvement in confidence as firms reach maturity.

Clearly, architects feel a lot more control over their work, and positioning, than they do in the promotion and business development of their firm.

The outcomes tested in this survey can be divided roughly into the 4 P’s Marketing Mix: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

The Marketing Mix is a foundational theory of modern marketing, the idea being that marketing strategy is a mix of these four important ingredients. If one element is off the mark, the service can fail completely to gain traction and achieve market fit.

What surprised me was the drop-off in confidence from product and pricing, to placement and promotion. The four, equally important areas of any businesses marketing plan

I was blown away to learn that the surveyed architects feel more control over whether or not they win awards than they do over their traffic or lead generation.

Traffic and lead generation are not luck, or voodoo, even for architecture firms.

I look forward repeating this survey in a year from now to monitor for changes in business confidence amongst architects.

Were you surprised by the results? Do you have an interesting take on the data? Share this post and your thoughts on LinkedIn to start a conversation with your colleagues, I’m very interested to hear your 2 cents.