Purplebricks
Repositioning from 'price' to 'smart' to unlock growth
Services Strategy, Brand Platform, Tone of Voice, Creative Direction
Purplebricks was built on a disruptive price proposition. The promise of selling for free. Allowing sellers to escape from the murky world of agent fees that rarely felt justified. Building their brand around this was a successful strategy that captured a specific segment of the market for years. Cementing Purplebricks as the market leader of a new generation of digital estate agents. However, this formative success had now become the greatest barrier to growth.
The Challenge
Purplebricks had a problem. Their platform had evolved significantly, but the new, sophisticated, tech-enabled service supported by local expertise hadn’t gained traction in shifting the market perception. In the market's mind, they were still a one-trick pony. Seen purely as the choice to avoid agents’ fees in exchange for a less comprehensive service.
This perception was toxic to their core business objective: driving consideration with a broader, more valuable audience. In short, their legacy had become a liability. With a tough economic climate causing the market to stutter, they needed to act quickly or risk losing out to the competition.
The Strategy
Our analysis identified a high-value ‘Savvy Seller’ segment. This audience is tech-enabled, values control, and seeks a seamless, connected experience (think switching from HSBC to Starling). The Purplebricks product was perfect for them, but its brand was a major turn-off. Critically, this audience doesn't choose based on cheap, they choose based on smart - a distinction that had to be hard-coded into the brand's memory structure.
It was clear Purplebricks couldn't just bolt new features onto the old price message; that approach lacked the necessary emotional depth for high brand memorability. We had to reposition the brand to show Purplebricks had changed. Our insight? The traditional selling process leaves people feeling powerless, but choosing Purplebricks feels like a power move. This emotional insight led to a new strategic brand platform, Move Smarter.
This wasn't a tagline. It was a new platform designed to drive the business forward by boosting Mental Availability. We repositioned Purplebricks from a low-cost alternative to the indisputable evolution of property sales, transforming the proposition from a fee-saving tactic into a badge of honour for a new, intelligent generation of Smart Movers. This shift from a transactional motive to an aspirational motive is key to creating deeper, more durable brand associations.
The Execution
We brought the Move Smarter platform to life by creating a distinctive visual system that could be activated quickly at scale by Purplebricks’ internal design and marketing team. We focused on the emotional payoff of smart control and showed Smart Movers rising above the stress and chaos of the traditional selling process. Shifting from a narrative of money saving, we communicated the peace of mind, certainty, and control (the powerful emotional dividends that drive long-term memory building) in a deliberately creative and distinctive way. Floating Smart Movers, purple clouds and blue skies became Distinctive Brand Assets that work within the existing Purplebricks brand style to build recognition, recall and association with more than selling for free.
We also engineered a stronger, smarter, and more confident tone of voice. It embraced the smart stats that Purplebricks have and supported the shift to the feeling of control the platform’s tech now delivers. This was codified into a comprehensive messaging matrix to deploy the new smart narrative consistently across the entire sales funnel. From top-level awareness to bottom-level conversion. This systemic consistency was essential to embedding the new positioning into consumer memory structures, ensuring the brand achieved high mental availability and was the first choice retrieved when the need to move arose.
The Result
This strategic repositioning provided the business with the platform it needed to achieve its future growth objectives. Pivoting the brand from 'price' to 'performance' and successfully shifting the core brand narrative away from the low-fee commodity trap, re-establishing Purplebricks as the premium, smart choice. Unlocking a high-value audience by arming the brand with the narrative and tools to connect with the ‘Savvy Seller’ demographic, driving consideration with a segment that was previously unattainable. And finally, delivering scalable brand assets across the "Move Smarter" platform was built as a long-term asset, providing a flexible yet consistent framework for all future marketing, product, and sales initiatives to build upon.
