In 1969, if a building product manufacturer wanted to reach an architect, they had a limited number of options. A salesperson with a sample case. A printed catalogue (typeset by hand), an advertisement in the trade press or a presence at a construction exhibition, if the budget stretched.
The architect, for their part, had a drawing board, a set of technical references and shelves full of product literature that arrived in the post.
That was the world CDP was founded in. Whilst almost everything about the mechanics of construction marketing has changed in the 55 years since, the underlying challenge in getting a building product understood, trusted and specified remains exactly what it always was.
In the early years of CDP, construction marketing was almost entirely a print discipline. Technical illustration was produced by hand, with skilled illustrators creating the cutaway views, exploded assembly diagrams and installation sequences that gave architects and specifiers the visual information they needed to understand a product or system.
The work was painstaking and the production timescales were long by today’s standards. Revisions meant returning to the drawing board, literally. Photography was expensive and technically difficult to integrate with technical content.
But the fundamentals of what made good construction marketing were already clear. Accuracy and audience mattered. Getting the technical detail right, in a format that the specifier could actually use, was the difference between literature that drove specification and literature that sat in a drawer. Those fundamentals have never changed.
Fast forward to the 1990s, where desktop publishing transformed the economics and speed of construction literature production. What had taken weeks could be turned around in days. The graphic quality of building product marketing improved dramatically. Manufacturers who had previously relied on basic product catalogues could produce specifier guides, technical manuals and promotional material to a standard that would have been prohibitively expensive a decade earlier.
The internet changed the distribution model entirely. Product data that had previously been available only in printed form could be downloaded. Websites replaced shelves as the specifier’s first port of call. NBS specifications went online, computer generated CAD details replaced the drawing board, digital photography replaced film and Email replaced the post.
In more recent times, construction marketing (like every other sector) eventually found itself on social media, producing content in formats that didn’t exist a decade earlier.
Through every technological shift and every new channel, the thing that drove specification remained constant. A product that could easily be understood by a specifier or architect was actually specified.
Every new medium, every new format, every new technology was simply a new way of answering the same question… does the audience understand the product and why is it the right choice for their project?
Of all the disciplines in construction marketing, technical illustration has seen the most dramatic transformation and remained the most constant in its purpose.
The hand-drawn cutaways of the 1970s gave way to CAD-based illustration in the 1980s and 1990s. CAD gave way to 3D modelling, which morphed into photorealistic rendering. This in turn is being challenged by AI-generated imagery that can produce a plausible-looking building in seconds.
We’ve used every iteration of those tools across our 55 years. What we’ve learned from all of them is that the tool is never the point. What matters is the accuracy of the technical content being communicated and the clarity with which it reaches the specifier.
A hand-drawn cross-section that correctly showed a roof build-up in 1975 did its job. A modern day AI-generated building that looks impressive but misrepresents an encasement does not. The sophistication of the output is irrelevant if the technical content is wrong or can’t be trusted by the architect who knows what correct looks like.
This is why we’ve been cautious about AI-generated imagery in specification marketing. Not because the technology isn’t impressive, but because impressive and accurate are not the same thing.
When building product websites became a serious marketing tool in the 2000s, there was a period of genuine uncertainty about what they should be. Were they digital catalogues? Technical libraries? Sales tools? Brand platforms?
The answer, it turned out, was all of those things.
An architect arriving from a search engine may want technical information such as performance data, system compatibility, tolerances, test certificates, etc. A contractor needs installation guidance. A homeowner needs to understand what the product looks like and where to buy it. All three arrive at the same homepage.
Getting that balance right in 1999 was difficult. Getting it right today is still difficult. The tools available to address it such as user journey mapping, content management systems, personalisation and SEO are dramatically more sophisticated. But the underlying challenge hasn’t changed. You have multiple audiences with different needs arriving at the same front door. Your website either serves them all or loses them.
Social media added new channels without changing the underlying logic. LinkedIn posts, technical videos and system animations are just newer ways of answering the same question. Does this specifier now understand this product well enough to write it into a project?
The most durable thing we’ve learned across five decades of working with building product manufacturers is that specifiers (architects, engineers, housebuilders, all levels of contractors) are sophisticated professional audiences who can tell the difference between marketing material that respects their expertise and marketing material that doesn’t.
They can tell when a technical illustration is accurate and when it’s misleading, or when a CPD has been created to sell rather than to inform. They have always been able to tell and have responded accordingly… manufacturers who communicate with them at their level get specified and the ones who don’t are ignored. That hasn’t changed in over half a century.
AI. Tools built with artificial intelligence will shape the next decade of construction marketing and are already visible on the horizon. Some of them will change the mechanics of how marketing is produced and distributed in ways that are difficult to anticipate.
What they won’t change is the specification decision itself. At the end of every design process, a specifier has to decide which product goes into the building. That decision will still be made on the basis of having trust and confidence in the product or system and the manufacturer behind it.
The job of construction marketing in building that understanding, trust and confidence will be exactly what it has always been.
We’ve been doing it since 1969. We expect to be doing it for a good while yet.