Guest Post: The Remaking of MFE

Here is a post John McManus had made recently on the Hanley Wood internal blog. When I heard our staff speak of the changes they were making, and the thoughtful reasons for doing so, I thought it was a compelling story that many could benefit from hearing. Proactively revisiting our value proposition or brand promise can be an energizing experience. 

Design director Gilly Berenson and Multifamily Group editor-in-chief Jerry Ascierto did a remarkable job of remaking MFE.

Gilly had been aching to give the title something she knew it needed as far back as late January of this year--a powerful, humanized invitation into the MFE world that would sharply contrast with the card-boardy, single-dimensional portraits that had been the title's legacy. She calls it a heroic image. Here's what she means by that.

What Gilly has done with her eye and her heart is simply to change MFE from a magazine about a housing industry community to a title for multifamily people. She has removed any iota of remoteness or plasticity, and brought to the title warmth, power, honesty, and immediacy. Never again can or will MFE come to its readers from a remote HW ivory tower; it's now all about people, their needs to know what they don't know, to be challenged on what they believe to be true, and to connect with peers on solutions to all the challenges.

Gilly's heroic image and the way the spirit of that image carries through all the new pages are intentional; it's all disruptive; it's about what's fun about work and amusing about information; it's about visual excitement and surprise; it's about coming back for more, again and again.
I think is an astonishing redesign, and it's not only that...It's a re-invention of MFE for its audiences, which Jerry Ascierto, Chris DeJoy, Scott Crawford, Derek Mearns, and Jane Wolkowicz took on in a collaborative effort with Gilly and designers Brian Wilson and Melissa Meyer.

Multifamily Executives ... like the rest of us these days ... are dealing with a ground shifting under their feet, even as broad-brush expectations for the segment are encouraging thanks to the coming to adulthood of almost 80 million Millennial Generation householders over the next decade or more. What multifamily executives used to do was to develop apartment communities, build garden, mid-rise, and high-rise apartment buildings, and manage them.

Today, their work is fundamentally different. They're marketers of high-stakes solutions for global investors, they're marketers and managers of personal financial investment needs for people who regard their housing choice virtually as a business decision on how they want to allocated resources and amass assets; they're builders of knowledge and talent bases that leverage smarts and operational effectiveness at the community level into big profits. In other words, they're dramatically different than the community whose information needs MFE served for two decades before as the star-maker b-to-b magazine of record.

The change in this community and in the needs it has for intelligence, data, and connection called for a whole new approach for the magazine, an approach Gilly and Jerry have introduced with the October issue.

A big part of the change in the pages and in the new mission is in viewpoint. Just as multifamily executives have borrowed from the best practices of the hospitality industry--customer care, empathy, energy, and a touch of whimsy--so MFE has taken some ideas from that pool and operationalized them in the redesign.

So, rather than traditional magazine Departments, the new MFE's sections each evoke a kind of call to action, a verb that says, "here's what you do here...." "here's what you can learn here..." etc.

For instance, CEO profiles evoke leadership, strategy, and mastery of operational effectiveness.... so the section heading for a profile is now "Inspire..." It's why you'd want to read the piece, hopefully.

Marketing, sales, social networking, renter acquisition and retention are all about ways organizations learn to reach out and touch their current and prospective customer base, so the section of the new MFE that puts these topics into the limelight is called TOUCH.

And, the front of the book section, where people want multiple access points, interest loci, energy, and must-see visualized data, it's simply called CHECK IN. What follows is the opener and a couple of examples of the section's flow of pages.

Here's another page of CHECK IN....

Each of these new sections, like that heroic image Gilly brought to the cover, compresses out the distance between us as editors and our audiences' needs and new role in information solutions as part of a connected community. 

You can see Gilly and Jerry talking about the new direction and challenges on the video Kaitlyn Auchincloss did on the series of re-designs.

Heroic is the word for the Multifamily team for committing to truly live and breathe its audience's pain and delight, and we're grateful to you and proud of you for taking on this raised level of ambition in your efforts to give your audience something they'll no doubt call theirs.

Also, welcome to the newest Multifamily Group content team members, assistant editors Linsey Isaacs and Charlotte O'Malley, who came out of the gate as immediate contributors to MFE, Affordable Housing Finance, and Apartment Finance Today. There's a tremendous lot going on in the multifamily community, and it's going to be a great learning ground in all of the disciplines we need excel in, so their arrival couldn't occur at a better time.

Hanley Wood has many examples of people not settling for good enough, and this MFE re-invention is one of them.

- John McManus, Editorial Director