Marketing beyond the boxes

Over the years, I have heard conversations about movers and relocation companies being bad at marketing themselves; that we don’t make our industry ‘sexy’ enough.

There truth is, it is not as straightforward as it seems.

I would like to start a conversation about what modern branding can look like for our industry. One thing is for sure – it is not about flashiness. It’s about solving customer anxieties, making expertise visible and telling the story in the right way.

To see what this could look like for us, it’s worth casting an eye outside of our own sector, to a freight-tech disruptor, a professional network that has some similarities to FIDI, and one wild card that redefined its entire category. Here’s what Flexport, global law networks and Airbnb can teach FIDI Affiliates about selling their services. p72_FF323Sep-Nov 26

Flexport: making the process the product

Flexport is a company working in freight forwarding and supply-chain management – an industry built on phone calls, pdfs and opacity. It did something simple that had a big impact: it gave customers a dashboard. Suddenly, they could see their shipment moving instead of trusting that it was.

Movers know all too well about this reality. The anxiety in relocation comes from the sense of not knowing; of wondering ‘where are my belongings right now; have customs cleared them; when exactly will my shipment arrive?’ This is why some movers – facilitated by a new generation of tracking technology – now offer a similar service to Flexport.

What is important to note here is that Flexport solved a root cause of anxiety and communicated this to customers with the message that ‘this is what working with us feels like’, rather than describing it in adjectives. That’s indirect, effective marketing.

Flexport didn’t stop there. It realised it was sitting on a goldmine – market knowledge – and it used this as communications and marketing content. Publishing trade data and trend reports that positioned it as an authority.

FIDI and its Affiliates sit on similar knowledge: relocation corridors, seasonal patterns, cost trends by city. Almost none of that information is currently public facing. FIDI collects data and shares it through many updates and reports. For the Affiliate, however, turning it into published insight – quarterly trends notes, data-based LinkedIn posts or short reports – is a low-cost way to build authority, with unique knowledge to which only a select group has access. p72_FF323Sep-Nov 26 p72_FF323Sep-Nov 26

Law networks: highlighting your experts

Another example we can look at are global law networks. They face a structural challenge, familiar to FIDI Affiliates, of independent local firms operating under a shared, trust-based umbrella, competing on the promise of ‘local knowledge, globally connected’.

For the law firms, the answer wasn’t to push the network brand harder; it was to make individual expertise visible. Named partners write, speak, get quoted and sit on panels, building credibility one visible expert at a time.

In relocation, our experts are the packers, move coordinators, quality control mangers, and so on.

We tend to hide our best assets: the people who are on the ground on packing day and who are liaising with the transferee. They know first hand how to handle a family’s anxiety on packing day and their joy when the container arrives at destination. That knowledge can become visible, named and shared.

It can be shared through speaking engagements, such as at the FIDI Conference or a webinar; through LinkedIn presence and posts; by contributing an article to FIDI Focus magazine; or via a staff page.

This does two things at once: it builds trust with corporate mobility departments and with individual assignees who want to know who they’re relying on. It turns every panel, webinar or industry conference talk into reusable marketing content, rather than a one-off event that disappears the moment it ends.

A conference panel on lump-sum policy, for example, doesn’t have to stay in the room. It can become the source material for months of content. FIDI does this by clipping short sections of our conference panels and sharing them throughout the summer period. p72_FF323Sep-Nov 26 p73_FF323Sep-Nov 26

Airbnb: redefining what you sell

Lastly, it is interesting to see what we can learn from a wild card. Airbnb is not at all similar to our industry, but we can certainly learn from how it boldly redefined its industry. It didn’t market ‘affordable rooms’, but instead the idea of belonging anywhere. It reframed an entire category around emotional identity rather than transaction.

This is not new for moving and relocation. We have long understood that it isn’t about moving boxes, but about the people and families moving. Selling ‘settling in’ or ‘home, wherever you land’ instead of ‘we pack your boxes’ is a shift from moving things to helping people arrive well. A plethora of interesting marketing material comes from this – real stories from real families and transferees, a designed arrival experience (welcome kit, local guide, a first-week check-in, for example).

Some movers have been doing this for a while; others still need to make this jump. Note, it is understandably hard to execute this change inside a traditionally operated business. It is worth sitting with, however, if only as a thought experiment. How can we be even more bold in redefining this industry? What would that look like?

None of the companies above move a single box, but each of them solved problems movers and relocation companies deal with every day: uncertainty, trust and change. Flexport made anxiety visible and then answered it; law networks made expertise visible instead of hiding it behind a firm name; and Airbnb made the emotional truth of what it sells the centre of its brand.

None of this needs a bigger budget, just a different starting question. Ask ‘what is our customer actually afraid of and are we answering it?’ That’s a question every Affiliate can ask this week, regardless of size or market. p73_FF323Sep-Nov 26