Marketing 101

As we enter year three, we looked back to our early discussions of what to name our fledgling. We decided to include one of the many well-known geographical sites around Addison County and particularly in its shire town, Middlebury. Should it be Otter Creek? There were already dozens of businesses saddled with the name of the river that bisects our county so that was dismissed. Ditto for Vermont, Addison County, Middlebury, Champlain Valley, and Green Mountain; they were everywhere we looked. How about Chipman Hill, the largest landmass in the center of Middlebury viewable from almost all corners of the community where we wanted our business to grow and thrive. It had an interesting history, great hiking, and supported the transmission towers for all of our cell phones. That was it! Now, what did we need to add to tell folks what we proposed to offer. We wanted to keep it simple, but more importantly, to be sure that we were not confusing our business with the usual “property management” label often used for firms that specialize in supervising rental properties or those that make their living cutting grass in the summer and plowing snow in the winter. Ours was to be a broader “service” enterprise which our clients could depend on for a range of homeowner services on a continuing basis. CHIPMAN HILL PROPERTY SERVICES was born and a logo was developed along with it.

Strangely enough, it occurred to us sometime well after we got underway that Chipman Hill had the same initials as the founders of the company, Conrad and Hollander. We’ve been thinking for some time that we should capitalize on this coincidence and so we are asking some of our clever and inventive friends to consider how we could use this in our marketing. If you have an aptitude for word play, we’ll give a prize to anyone who can make use of the letters C and H to help us spread the gospel of Chipman Hill Property Service.