CBRE
Global Content Strategy

Studio: Trollbäck+Company
Role: Chief Creative Officer

We worked with CBRE to re-envision the future of thought leadership development and implementation on a global scale. Working with stakeholders at all levels, we optimized the organization’s entire content creation ecosystem in order to forefront CBRE’s world-class data and insights and deliver on the new brand vision, “Realizing Potential in Every Dimension.”

CBRE is the global leader in commercial real estate services and investment, spanning five continents, billions of dollars in capital, and over 100k employees worldwide. Our role was to develop a future-forward strategy that seamlessly and intuitively unites its multinational content creation efforts.

Unlocking the value of CBRE content began with deep research to arrive at a clear insight: Make less do more across every output, team, and platform. We began by interviewing researchers, economists, and decision-makers across the company—immersing ourselves in the world of commercial real estate, its global economic implications, and CBRE’s internal practices for delivering data and insights to audiences.

Collaborative working sessions and comprehensive audits helped drive a complete rethinking of CBRE’s global content lenses and outputs to create a new framework that delivers clarity, consistency, and a compelling POV that is unique to the industry leader.

A new thematic structure with a radically simplified set of content formats provides maximum creativity, flexibility, and connectivity across all CBRE channels. The content framework enables the company to own the big ideas shaping the commercial real estate marketplace. All insights are now driven by five big-picture themes focused on the high-level transformations reshaping the industry across every dimension. 

A streamlined and differentiated set of content formats spans print and digital, longform and short-form, supported by new activation tactics, intuitively-named franchises, and event types, establishing an intuitive system of connected content outputs. This structure empowers CBRE teams around the world to more efficiently create content that’s engaging, targeted, and newsworthy to different segments of its audience. 

To implement the new strategy, we created a global playbook and hosted a series of live, interactive seminars that equipped staff with writing guidelines. Spanning a wide array of experience levels, teams, and regions, we designed and led workshops to give CBRE teams hands-on experience working within the new content ecosystem—including segments on business writing best practices, activating content through themes, and developing stories across output types.

CBRE content creators across every line of business now have the tools necessary for making insights relevant, accessible, clear, and compelling, while also contributing to a framework where future-focused research and market-changing data have the power to not only shape the real estate industry, but the world as we know it.