Case Study
From a functional building to a place of the future
Background
An institutional property owner was faced with the task of repositioning an existing office property in a central city-centre location. The architectural plans for a comprehensive refurbishment were already in place – the strategic question that remained was how and for whom the building should be positioned in future. Traditional key performance indicators such as the occupancy rate or rent per square metre were no longer sufficient for the owner to assess the long-term success of the property.
Workshop & Keynote – developing a shared understanding of how AI, hybrid working and new forms of organisation are not only changing where people work, but why people still go to a physical location at all.
Potential analysis – evaluating the building not on the basis of its current condition, but on the basis of its potential across eight dimensions: architecture, location, community, experience, flexibility, value creation, identity and sustainability.
Positioning – identification of target groups, value proposition, brand identity and eight strategic guiding principles as a binding framework for architecture, operations and marketing.
Narrative & Visual Language – Translating the positioning into a narrative storyline and concrete, people-centred visual scenarios as the basis for communication.
In future, companies will choose locations less on the basis of their location or facilities and more on the basis of the contribution a location makes to their own value creation.
Communal areas are no longer merely ancillary spaces, but the strategic hubs of a property – this is where trust, interaction and a sense of identity are fostered.
Identity does not arise through communication, but through the consistent alignment of approach, architecture and use.
The operator is evolving from a property manager into a host – the guiding principle: “Hotelier rather than landlord”.
A traditional office property was transformed into a strategic vision: an actively designed workplace for knowledge-intensive, innovation-driven companies, whose success is no longer measured solely by the occupancy rate, but by the contribution it makes to collaboration, learning and value creation amongst its users. Building on this positioning, a narrative, key messages and a new visual language were developed for future marketing.
“The future competitiveness of an office property does not depend on a single factor, but on the interplay between architecture, community, experience and attitude.”
