Alexandria
Real Estate Equities
Alexandria Real Estate Equities is one of the largest life science REITs in the country. They didn't need a brand — they needed one for something new: a first-of-its-kind events division launched through a national private club partnership.
Alexandria Real Estate Equities (ARE)
2021
Brand & Marketing Strategist
Brand Strategy · Marketing Strategy · Content Direction · Campaign Development
How the work I built for one client created access to another
The University Club is part of Invited Clubs, one of the largest private club networks in the country. After delivering back-to-back Club of the Year wins for the University Club, Invited's leadership took notice — and brought me into a new strategic opportunity: a first-of-its-kind partnership between Invited Clubs and Alexandria Real Estate Equities.
ARE is one of the largest publicly traded REITs in the country, specializing in life science campuses that house biotech firms, research labs, and pharmaceutical tenants. When they partnered with Invited Clubs to launch a new events division, they needed brand strategy, identity, and positioning built from the ground up for something that had never existed before.
Defining a brand through production
When the brief is “build a brand for something that’s never existed before,” you don’t start with a deck. You start with discovery — understanding what these campuses actually meant to the people working in them, what the partnership between two very different organizations was actually trying to say, and what this events division needed to stand for to earn credibility in both worlds.
I developed the brand strategy, identity, and positioning for the ARE × Invited Clubs events division — creating a brand that could operate credibly within ARE's life science campus ecosystem while connecting to Invited Clubs' membership base and culture. The platform needed its own visual language, messaging architecture, and positioning built from scratch, respecting both parent organizations without being absorbed by either.The engagement scaled from strategy into full production: a six-figure shoot across 3 campuses over 5 days with a 30-person crew. For production, I partnered with Drive Media — known for Monster Energy and the Baja 500 — to bring their documentary-grade, extreme sports cinematography into a Fortune 500 real estate context. The juxtaposition was intentional. That's the gap between brand consulting and brand execution — the ability to move from strategic framework to physical production at the scale a Fortune 500 organization expects.
"Brand strategy for something that doesn’t exist yet doesn’t arrive pre-built. It gets defined in pre-production — through discovery, through the right questions, through decisions made before a camera rolls. That’s the work that made the production possible."
1000
compounds
Alexandria Real Estate Equities
Life Science Real Estate · Fortune 500
Klifton Semo
