Meyer Bergman: entering the US without becoming another name on the list
Meyer Bergman, the London real estate investment manager known for turning urban assets into retail-led places, was preparing to expand into the United States. Working as part of TRIA’s team, I ran the brand audit and competitive analysis, led the stakeholder consultation, built three brand scenarios and facilitated the workshop that chose between them, then wrote the brand platform and messaging. The firm managed more than €5 billion in assets at the time.
The problem
In its home market, Meyer Bergman’s reputation did the explaining. The buildings, the track record and the people were known. In a new market none of that arrives ahead of you, and a firm with a decade of European work becomes, on first encounter, one more investment manager with a strong deck.
The brand had to say what the reputation used to say, to people who had never heard of it.
What I found
The audit surfaced more than the team expected: inconsistencies and gaps across the firm’s own materials that nobody inside had catalogued, because everyone already knew the story and so nobody noticed it was never written down.
The stakeholder work was the more interesting half. Using Appreciative Inquiry, I interviewed executives, long-serving employees and marquee clients — asking what the firm was at its best rather than what was wrong with it. The answers converged on something the marketing had not been claiming: this was a firm that read cities, not one that bought square metres.
That is the kind of difference a competitor cannot copy by rewriting a page, and it does travel across borders.
What I did
Rather than present one recommendation, I built three brand scenarios, each pushing a different genuine strength of the firm and each implying a different competitive fight. We took them into a workshop with the senior stakeholders, so the choice was made in the room by the people who would have to live with it.
From the chosen scenario I wrote the brand platform — purpose, value proposition and a boilerplate short enough to survive being repeated — and refined the messaging across the touchpoints the US expansion would run through.
The brand scenario development and facilitated workshop provided an exceptional opportunity for all our stakeholders to be heard and to listen to the perspectives of others.
Marcus Meyer · CEO, Meyer Bergman
Why it mattered
Entering a market is the moment a firm discovers how much of its reputation was local. Three scenarios rather than one recommendation also did something a deck cannot: it made the leadership team argue its way to a position, which is why the position held once the expansion started.
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