Pine Canyon
Client Background
Pine Canyon is a 620-acre private, luxury community in Flagstaff, Arizona, developed by Scottsdale-based Symmetry Companies. In addition to its 18-hole championship golf course, Pine Canyon prides itself on its overall lifestyle, recreation, and real estate options.
The Challenge
Influencing the top 1%–5% wealth cohort is notoriously difficult – a hyper-affluent demographic with the means to purchase a $3–$5 million home anywhere. While the quality of the homes, lifestyle, and overall environment of the Pine Canyon community represented an excellent match for the audience, the marketing had historically failed to find a way to influence consumer preferences to choose a home at Pine Canyon instead of a house with a competitor. In addition, the quality of the graphic design, web design, copywriting, and overall communications were not aligned with the expectations of a high-end audience – exacerbated by siloing between different departments.
The Tools
The Creative Concept
To drive Pine Canyon beyond a simple transactional mindset required rethinking the brand’s anatomy in every respect, as well as gaining a better understanding of the audiences they wanted to reach and the communication vehicles used to reach them. WHYFOR understood that the answer was rooted in what this affluent buyer needed and what Pine Canyon could provide – a place of refuge to feed their human spirit. Working in partnership with the ownership team, WHYFOR dug deeper into the meaning of the human spirit, viewed through the lens of Pine Canyon community members and the perspectives of art, psychology, knowledge, and philosophy. The four components of Pine Canyon – golf, wellness, hospitality, and home sales – needed to work in concert rather than as separate entities.
The outcome was an understanding that Pine Canyon offered something that can’t be attached to a dollar amount: a recognition that there is a difference between a house (a building you just live in) and a home (a place where you belong). Ultimately, this led to the creation of several emotion-evoking taglines, “A Refuge for the Human Spirit,” “A Place Where the World Revolves Around You,” and “Everything You Want, All that You Need.”
Creating a unified message also warranted transitioning to a hub-and-spoke model for all marketing and advertising communications. During the past year, these concepts have been implemented top-to-bottom in Pine Canyon’s messaging, from the design of a new website and community brochure down to daily social media campaigns and email marketing blasts. Regardless of the department, each communication explicitly conveys the value of the community as a place to unplug, escape, and connect with family, friends, and nature.
