Choose Your Own Construction Marketing Journey
Construction marketing is full of decisions. This book lets you make them.
Most business books tell you what the author thinks you should do. Choose Your Own Construction Marketing Journey takes a different approach.
You are placed inside realistic situations facing construction marketers and company leaders. Each scenario gives you three possible choices. You make the decision, follow the corresponding path, and discover the consequences.
Some choices work. Some create problems you did not anticipate. And some may feel uncomfortably familiar.
The goal is not to teach one supposedly perfect way to market a construction company. It is to improve the judgment behind the decisions.
Built around the realities of construction.
Generic marketing advice rarely survives contact with the construction industry.
Our sales cycles are long. Relationships matter. Proposals can consume enormous amounts of time. Competitors become joint-venture partners. Architects and other influencers can shape the shortlist long before a contractor sees an RFP. Backlog, capacity, safety, bonding, geography, recruiting, market sectors, subcontractor relationships, and operations all influence which opportunities a company should pursue.
Marketing decisions cannot be separated from those realities.
The scenarios in Choose Your Own Construction Marketing Journey were written specifically around the challenges construction marketers and leaders face rather than borrowing examples from consumer brands, ecommerce companies, or software startups.
There is rarely one right answer.
Should you pursue the project? Enter the new market? Rebrand? Invest in SEO? Hire another marketer? Spend another week on a proposal with questionable odds? Push back on the CEO?
The answer is usually not “always” or “never.”
It depends on the company’s strategy, capacity, positioning, relationships, economics, culture, and what leadership is trying to build. That is why the book asks you to choose instead of simply handing you another checklist.
Then it makes you live with the consequences.
More than a branching business book.
The choose-your-own-journey structure makes the book interactive, but the scenarios are only part of it.
Throughout the book, additional sections help readers understand what happened and apply the lesson to their own companies.
Executive Briefs
Concise strategic takeaways written for executives and senior leaders who want to understand the business implications behind the marketing decision.
Field Manuals
Practical guidance readers can use to evaluate opportunities, improve marketing decisions, and put the lessons into action.
The CMO’s Take
My perspective on the decision, including the experience and reasoning behind choices that may look very different from the marketing department than they do from the executive suite.
Plumb & True
Deeper observations about the underlying issue behind the scenario, because the obvious marketing problem is not always the real business problem.
Reframes
Prompts designed to challenge familiar assumptions and help readers reconsider how their companies approach marketing, growth, brand, and leadership.
Who is this book for?
The book was written for construction marketers and company leaders who want marketing to contribute more to the business.
That includes coordinators early in their careers, experienced marketing directors trying to move further upstream, business-development professionals, and executives who want stronger marketing decisions without needing to become marketers themselves.
You do not need a marketing degree.
You do need to be willing to make a decision.
Why I wrote it
I began working with construction companies in 2005, and I have watched the industry become considerably more sophisticated since then.
Marketing departments have grown. Digital channels have transformed how buyers research companies. Construction marketers have become more capable, more strategic, and more connected to the business.
Yet many companies still underuse them.
Marketing is still too often treated primarily as the department responsible for proposals, events, promotional items, social media, and whatever request happens to land in the inbox that morning.
Those things may need to get done.
They are not the highest use of marketing.
Strong marketing can help a construction company choose better markets, attract better-fit clients, increase perceived value, improve hit rates, strengthen client retention, recruit talent, launch new services, expand geographically, support business development, and create a more resilient growth strategy.
The book is designed to help marketers think more like business leaders—and help business leaders better understand what strategic marketing can contribute.
Read it alone. Then argue about it with your team.
The scenarios work as an individual reading experience, but they can become even more valuable when several people inside the same company make the decision independently.
Give a marketer, a business developer, an operations leader, and the CEO the same situation and ask each person what they would do.
The answers may reveal that they are solving four different problems. That conversation is part of the lesson.
The journey continues.
This book was designed as the beginning of a series rather than the end of one. Future volumes can explore new decisions, markets, technologies, leadership challenges, and changes in the way construction companies compete and grow.
The industry will keep changing. That means we will keep getting new choices.
Paperback · $24.99
ISBN 979-8-9972837-0-4
By perryn@aeccmos.com
Construction Executive’s Guide to Brand Marketing and the Tools of the Trade
By Perryn Olson, CPSM, CCMP
Originally published in 2014 | Out of Print
My first book about construction marketing.
In 2014, I wrote Construction Executive’s Guide to Brand Marketing and the Tools of the Trade for an audience I believed was underserved: construction executives who understood how to build companies and projects but had rarely been given a practical framework for understanding marketing.
At the time, many contractors were emerging from a brutal recession that had dramatically increased competition for fewer projects. Companies that had historically relied on good work, relationships, and reputation were discovering that those strengths still mattered, but they were no longer enough on their own.
Construction companies needed to become better at communicating their value.
The book was my attempt to help.
Marketing is bigger than promotion.
One of the central arguments of the book was that marketing should not be treated as an occasional expense reserved for good times.
Marketing affects which projects a company attracts, how it maintains relationships, how it differentiates itself, how clients experience the company, and how effectively the organization grows.
The book defined marketing broadly as educating and communicating with a company’s community—not simply advertising to prospective clients.
That community includes clients and prospects, but also employees, prospective employees, subcontractors, partners, vendors, and others whose experiences influence the company’s reputation.
Your brand is not your logo.
A major theme throughout the book is that a construction company’s brand is the collection of experiences people have with it.
The logo may represent the company visually, but the brand is shaped by far more: the way people answer the phone, the condition of a jobsite, the client’s experience during construction, communication, employee behavior, safety, relationships, reputation, and the consistency between what the company promises and what it delivers.
That thinking continues to influence my work today.
The terminology has evolved, and I now think about many of these ideas through the lens of building a Magnetic Brand, but the underlying principle remains: a strong construction brand must be more than attractive marketing materials.
It has to create value.
Construction companies need differentiation.
Another major focus of the book was an industry problem that has not disappeared.
Too many construction companies look and sound remarkably similar.
They talk about their people, quality, safety, relationships, and delivering projects on time and on budget. Those attributes matter, but when every competitor says essentially the same thing, they do little to help a client make a decision.
The book challenges contractors to identify and communicate the expertise, culture, capabilities, processes, markets, personality, or other characteristics that make them a better choice for the right client.
That distinction can help a company become easier to choose and less dependent on price.
Today, that same problem is one of the reasons A/E/C CMOs continues to research Brand Distinction across the industry.
Marketing and business development should reinforce each other.
The book also separates marketing from business development while emphasizing the importance of the two disciplines working together.
Business development builds and advances relationships. Marketing creates positioning, awareness, communication, tools, intelligence, and other support that makes those relationships more productive.
Neither should operate in a silo.
The book also explores marketing-team roles ranging from coordinators and managers through directors, vice presidents, and the Chief Marketing Officer. Even in 2014, I argued that construction companies would increasingly need executive-level marketing leadership as the industry became more competitive and sophisticated.
That idea eventually became part of the foundation for A/E/C CMOs and the Construction Marketing Officer™ framework.
What the book covers
The 230-plus-page guide is organized around three major areas:
Brand Marketing
Topics include the importance of marketing, brand fundamentals, differentiation, positioning, buyer perspective, audiences, and the reach of a construction company’s brand.
Team
The book examines the people responsible for carrying the brand forward, including marketing and business development, internal marketing teams, outside resources, and the structure of growing marketing organizations.
Tools of the Trade
The final section explores the practical tools construction companies were using to market themselves, including websites, social media, proposals, presentations, brochures, newsletters, jobsite marketing, public relations, advertising, integrated campaigns, and rebranding.
The book concludes with resources and a self-guided brand audit.
More than a decade later
I would not write every chapter the same way today.
Technology has changed. Buyers have changed. Construction marketing has matured considerably, and so has my thinking about what senior marketing leadership should contribute to the business.
That evolution is part of the reason this book belongs here.
Construction Executive’s Guide to Brand Marketing and the Tools of the Trade captures an earlier stage of my work in this industry and many of the ideas that eventually developed into my current thinking around Magnetic Brands, strategic marketing leadership, differentiation, client experience, marketing and BD alignment, and the Construction Marketing Officer™.
It was the beginning of a much longer conversation.
This title is currently out of print.
