Marketing
Being a pioneering development into eco-housing within the UK, it was interesting to investigate how the homes were marketed, not only to get them to sell and turn a profit, but also how eco-housing could be sold to a mass market in the future.
The houses, despite completion in 2008, weren’t already sold. An advertisement for Unit 3 appeared on the Green Moves Website(x) detailing the features, size and cost. The developers had predicted that they would all sell before completion as they were pioneering developments into eco housing in the UK, however unfortunately they didn’t. One explanation is down to the financial crisis during 2008. With restricted lending from banks, the housing market suffered a major blow, and house prices have fallen. Unit 3, the largest of the 3 bedroom houses was priced at approximately £300 thousand, making it more expensive than comparably sized homes, and in times of hardship, eco home credentials are likely to be seen as an extravagance to the mass market.
In the brochure provided by Ecos homes, there are few realistic images and photographs of the actual completed houses. In the brochure they omit photographs of any completed element in favour of repeating an artists’ watercolour interpretation twice, and a computer generated image twice.
One explanation for this is that they are not aiming to sell the aesthetics of the eco home, complete with solar panels, rainwater harvesting and other technology, but are trying to sell the opportunity of living within a quaint cottage style home like the rest of the street, just as the watercolour portrays. Further evidence for this notion lies within an article for The Telegraph(xi). In an article debating the pros and cons of eco homes, with specific example to this case, The Telegraph states that “buyers still seem reluctant to live in them” and that survey findings from the National House Building Council reveal that people “don’t like the look of eco homes, preferring more traditional styles”.
Even in supplementary material that has appeared since construction, like the Ecos website(xii), and the O2i website(xiii), photographs of the whole completed building are limited. These photographs focus on specific design elements, such as a specific porch or window, yet lack in any large shot of a whole building. I believe this could be a result of unhappiness with some finished elements of the housing, particularly the wooden cladding, which has started to become discoloured in some areas due to weathering.
With regards to the text within the brochure, the developers have explained more about the sustainable aspects of the home, splitting the brochure into three main areas. The first sub category the brochure looks at is the location. They dedicate an entire page detailing that it’s a picturesque little village in the South-West, yet still has great transport links. After going over the floor plans of the units, the brochure talks about the sustainability of the homes. Here they simply list the credentials and technologies the houses, with only a small picture of a wood burner, some pellets, and a solar panel for reference. The document lacks any diagrammatic explanation of how the systems work, possibly because they don’t want to bore or alienate the average user. The developers never gave the residents any tuition about how to run the technologies after moving in, and for the first few months the solar panels weren’t wired up correctly and the rainwater harvesting system didn’t work. According to Professor Fionn Stevenson (leading the research from the University of Sheffield)(xiv), “One of the occupants had been given the wrong information about the ventilation system and thought it was a heat recovery system. They left it on all day and their house got very cold”.
Finally within the brochure, it advertises the high specification of the homes, listing all its attributes and fittings, focusing more on the high quality of the furnishing and build of the house, than the technology the home possesses.
To summarise, in order to sell the homes, the developers have focused more on the other aspects of design, the quality of the fittings, and how living within them is just as normal as any other home. In doing so, they skate over the important technical details, tuition on how the systems work, and detail the eco credentials of the homes merely as a bonus, rather than the whole point of the homes.