Starting your dream job. Getting fired. Falling in love. Falling out of love. Moving in. Moving out. Moving on. As humans living in this wild and crazy world, some of our most monumental experiences are underscored by leaving somewhere we once lived and finding a new place to call home. And with each new set of keys comes something bigger: the promise of a fresh start (even if things get… a little interesting) along the way.
To capture this universal feeling, Revery partnered with the user-friendly rental app Zumper to develop a campaign platform that would redefine how renters interacted with, well, renting. We built our campaign on a powerful – and easily overlooked – insight: you don’t need to own something in order to have a sense of ownership. After all, renting can give you a sense of personal agency: the freedom to move anywhere, anytime, can truly change your life.
To begin, we faced a big challenge – Zumper was a relatively nascent brand in a category of formidable giants like Zillow and Apartments.com, and the rental category as a whole had generated consumer disenfranchisement and fatigue. To drive awareness for Zumper, we not only had to find a uniquely ownable space for the brand to occupy, we also had to break through the collective apathy renters had developed from years of frustration, disheartening experiences, and branding that felt a little soulless.
The keys to Zumper’s new brand platform? A content library built on a foundation of human storytelling and emotional connection. This was Zumper’s first foray into branded content, and we wanted to encourage Zumper users to approach renting with a brand new sense of optimism. Our goal was to humanize renting, and to position Zumper so effectively that consumers defined the category around the brand. We built our campaign around the idea of a fresh start: we were coming off of 2020, a year racked with change, upheaval, and uncertainty, and we were heading into the spring of 2021, which happened to be peak rental season.
With this in mind, we didn’t want to ignore the tough reasons renters might be searching for a new place – like loss, or unexpected change – so we embraced those too. We also didn’t want to alienate landlords (Zumper’s other consumer target), at the cost of appealing to renters. We sought to create a fresh start for all of Zumper’s present and future users, with messaging that celebrated the good things, acknowledged the hard things, and promised it would all be worth it.
The result: With a quick timeline and red hot brief in hand, Revery concepted, shot, produced, and delivered a series of assets that would help reinforce Zumper’s new brand positioning. This included a hero video, plus cutdowns Zumper and their digital marketing partners could use across platforms to drive mass awareness. We weren’t only aiming to develop a better experience with Zumper, but a better experience with renting overall. After all, when life gives you lemons, sometimes the best thing you can do is put them in a bowl on the counter of your brand new kitchen.