KB Home
Homebuyer Campout Story
Summary
KB Home is one of America’s largest homebuilders with operating divisions in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. We began work with the San Diego division of KB Home in November 2000. We work closely with the marketing team, coordinating community grand openings and special events as well as ongoing local media relations.
KB Home’s marketing team wanted increased media coverage of their local communities, particularly with television, which was most successful in reaching their target audience and driving traffic to their communities. We also wanted to position KB Home as a leading expert on trends in the local housing market.
San Diego is one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation (recently ranked number nine by the National Association of Home Builders). As a result, homes that are priced at the lower end of the spectrum are highly sought-after by first-time buyers and the market has gotten very competitive. KB Home had begun to experience campouts outside of its new home communities, with hopeful buyers sleeping in cars and motor homes for days to be the first ones inside when the doors of the model homes opened on Saturday mornings. We identified this as a great TV story opportunity, which was rare since the nature of the client’s business didn’t always lead itself well to TV (but more real estate and business print media). This story, however, had a large-scale appeal, because so many people in our region were faced with skyrocketing housing prices and what was being termed a local “housing crisis.”
The execution would be tricky. Due to liability issues (i.e. nervous attorneys), we did not want to encourage people to go camp out at the communities, but simply wanted to report that it was happening. This would require very specific timing on our part. People started lining up on Wednesday morning for a Saturday morning opening at two separate KB Home communities in two different parts of the county. Having stories air too soon would inevitably encourage more people to head down to the communities and join them. We determined that we would want media coverage to take place Saturday morning – targeting the morning news shows, which would air just prior to the opening of the models and sales offices.
A media alert was drafted in advance and was approved and ready to distribute to the television stations in the late afternoon on Friday. Although campers were lined up at both the Chula Vista and Scripps Ranch locations, we decided to focus on the Chula Vista community since we knew from previous experience that the TV crews sometimes had problems with their signals in Scripps Ranch due to hilly terrain.
The morning of the event, KB Home’s marketing team was on-hand with donuts and coffee for the campers, doing everything they could to make them feel good about their long wait in the final hours before the doors opened. We began making follow-up calls to the television stations – offering current figures on the number of people waiting outside – and coordinated getting the crews to the scene. We provided the marketing manager with speaking points for his on-air interviews, made sure he was wearing proper KB Home attire for good visibility, and located ideal shooting locations for the crews in the sales center and in front of and inside the model homes.
Results
The results were better than anticipated. Even on a Saturday morning when there is always a finite number of news crews available, we had three television stations at the community. One, Fox 6 News, even made multiple trips to the site to shoot additional footage and interviews. Campers were interviewed about why they waited so long to buy a KB Home, KB Home’s marketing manager was interviewed and the model homes and community name and location were given very prominent mentions. We received a total of five TV spots, including one live segment on NBC 7/39 (over three minutes of coverage) plus several spots on the evening news to help drive traffic to the community for the following day.
At that time, KB Home had four new home communities in Chula Vista, one of the fastest growing areas in the county with several other communities by competing homebuilders. By the end of opening day, KB Home had sold out the entire phase that was being released. Now, just six months later, KB Home is almost completely sold out of all phases of its four communities in Chula Vista, and will soon be moving on to new regions of the county to build. The client could not have been happier with the results of the coverage and even used the campaign as a “best practices” case study that was shared with all of its markets around the country.