In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans where Rob and Adrienne call home. At the time, we ran a small digital marketing agency that serviced a couple of local commercial contractor clients and many others from a variety of unrelated industries. With our construction clients, we were mostly focused on marketing heavy highway civil contractors and home services contractors at the time.
When the massive and deadly-dangerous hurricane approached the city, we activated our meager evacuation plan by sending our employees off with their desktop computers after packing up our offices and grabbing irreplaceables like client archives, family photos and important papers. So, with a 6 month old baby girl, 2 year old son and 4 cats we evacuated New Orleans for what we would soon learn would be for over a month.
Our business was dead in the water. Our region was devastated. We believed it was the end of our young agency we had worked so hard to grow.
We set up a temporary office in Baton Rouge in space loaned to us by one of our clients and started making calls. The city and surrounding area was shut down and no commerce seemed to be happening. But slowly, after several weeks, calls started coming in from our contractor clients. They needed help. They needed vital help. They needed help finding and rallying their employees and getting the word out that they were up and running with contracts waiting. They needed their websites and social media systems up and working. The clean-up work and reconstruction contracts from both local and federal agencies needed qualified contractors, and our clients had the resources and equipment to do the work if they could find and reconnect with their employees who had dispersed across the region.
Using our digital communication know-how, and digital tools available at the time (remember, it was 2005. MySpace was only 2 years old and Facebook was a recent startup. We were still using dial-up and flip phone.) we helped our GC’s in Louisiana get back to work and back to profitability with their website, advertising, social media systems. Their businesses exploded with growth. In turn – they helped us bounce back from Katrina and become even better.
As a "thank you" gesture for our help, one of our large GC Business Developer connections offered to "get us established in Construction Marketing," and we took him up on the offer. We assembled a specialized team of marketing and communication professionals who were willing to learn about the unique aspects of the commercial build industry and the specialized way these businesses utilized marketing to assist their business developers bid and win the best contracts. Construction Marketing is different than marketing consumer products. It relies heavily on nurturing interpersonal relationships, building and protecting a reputation of safety, reliability, capability and trust, and demonstrating the willingness to overcome the unexpected with innovative solutions.
We needed a digital marketing agency as unique as the industry we were to serve, and thus The Brand Constructors was launched in 2006. With and small team of specialists operating along side our Design the Planet team of creative specialists, we became the construction industry's Marketing Subcontractors.
Today, we help a variety of build industry clients nurture professional relationships, communicate strategic differentiation, tell their unique stories of why and how they add value to every bid they submit, and find and hire the best technicians available. Our core values align with the serious and conservative values of our build industry clients, and our participation in industry events and associations is vital to our continuing education. We owe a debt of gratitude to the build industry for our professional success, and are committed to repaying that debt by assisting remarkable contractors, big and small, with leveraging digital marketing systems and tools so they can achieve their goals of building the infrastructure of America's future.
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