I wanted to understand how attitudes might be shifting in the industry as architects adopt modern, relevant marketing strategies for their firms.

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The chart below comes from a survey I sent to 500 registered architects.

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I asked them to rate on a scale how much they felt they had total control, some control or no control over all of the typical marketing outcomes within their firm.

I was curious to know whether a firm’s perspective would change as their headcount grew.

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The median firm size of the architecture firms I surveyed was four people including the director, so I have separated the data between firms with less than four, and four or more employees.

I split the group into firms who were five less years old, and more than five years old.

The results were very similar when broken down by age, or headcount – with only a slight improvement in confidence as firms reach maturity.

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Clearly, architects feel a lot more control over their work, and positioning, than they do in the promotion and business development of their firm.

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The outcomes tested in this survey can be divided roughly into the 4 P’s Marketing Mix: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

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The Marketing Mix is a foundational theory of modern marketing, the idea being that marketing strategy is a mix of these four important ingredients. If one element is off the mark, the service can fail completely to gain traction and achieve market fit.

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What surprised me was the drop-off in confidence from product and pricing, to placement and promotion. The four, equally important areas of any businesses marketing plan

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I was blown away to learn that the surveyed architects feel more control over whether or not they win awards than they do over their traffic or lead generation.

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Traffic and lead generation are not luck, or voodoo, even for architecture firms.

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I look forward repeating this survey in a year from now to monitor for changes in business confidence amongst architects.

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Were you surprised by the results? Do you have an interesting take on the data? Share this post and your thoughts on LinkedIn to start a conversation with your colleagues, I’m very interested to hear your 2 cents.