KB Home, this morning, unveils a new look and feel.

The announcement introduces a new logo, which in the company's terms, "is grounded in its customer-focused roots and designed to engage a new generation of home buyers."

Riding along with freshened, friendly, Silicon Valley-inspired imagery, a new tagline asserts, "Built on Relationships."

On the surface of it, the announcement is about a brand, how the outside world comes to recognize, believe, and value what KB as an organization does.

Deeper down, however, the KB rebranding--you can check it out here--strikes at the core identity of America's sixth largest home building enterprise, revealing a very basic cultural belief about who the company is, what direction its strategy will take, and how it works. The press statement this morning reads:

“KB Home has always been built on relationships – with customers, suppliers, trade contractors, land sellers, realtors, and municipalities, as well as between colleagues,” said Jeff Mezger, KB Home’s president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board. “This evolution of our brand aligns with our heritage of offering an exceptional customer-first experience to more than 600,000 families. It’s a bold and positive new visual identity that captures the essence of who we are for today’s and future homebuyers.”

Profoundly, although the KB Home brand makeover may not pack the same kind of wallop as a recent series of mergers and acquisitions announcements, it speaks of a transformative, equally seismic moment of discovery we see among America's large home building enterprises. It's one that has been working underneath the outer details this three-year-lurch of nine and 10-figure transactions, joint ventures, and investments.

The initiative gets at two separate but intertwined questions, both of which have enormous business ramifications, now and into the future.

One question--and we've asked it before--is who are you? Are you, as a home builder, an expert in architectural design, real estate development, investing, construction management, procurement and logistics, technology integration, local community politics, marketing, sales, retailing, data management, consumer insight, and mortgage finance?

If you, as a builder, try to be all of those things can you be any one of them well?

As consolidation in home building meets data and technology's power to shrink geographical space and convert all time into real-time, we see more of home building's progressive enterprises removing themselves--operationally--from two areas of business once considered to be foundational to success: real estate speculation and day-to-day construction, upstream of increasing complex supply chain management and soon-to-be-more-available offsite manufacturing processes.

Directionally, this points to what KB is doing, which is defining itself and its promise of value more exclusively and more emphatically in terms of a customer's experience, a customer's journey, a customer's sense of who he, she, or they want and expect themselves to become.

A second, interrelated but discrete, question peers out toward the future as a company like KB asserts that innovation and customer-centricity go hand in hand. This question--"what do you want to be?--vibrates around instances, flashes and flickers of recognition, of something big that's happening, but it's hard to say exactly what it is.

In very real ways, and from looking at some of the bigger combinations among residential real estate and home building players in the last couple of years, we sense that one era is ending and another beginning in the context of "what do you want to be?"

  • While physical real estate proves to be cyclical again and again, intellectual property value is pan-cyclical.
  • If a home and community are, in essence, about well-being and the ability to prosper, then people who want, work for, and attain those states of being are the ones who put home builders in business. Or take them out of it.

As this New York Times article, "Buying a Home Sight Unseen," by Candace Jackson notes, people's journey to attain well-being and a place to prosper is taking decidedly different routes than it ever used do.

“There’s an e-commerce mentality sinking into the American consciousness,” said Glenn Kelman, the chief executive of Redfin. “Zappos popularized the idea that you can buy shoes online. I think it’s true for almost any goods in America now.”

A trusted, simple promise signified by a distinctive logo, coupled with an elegant user experience that removes what's of no value and amplifies what is of value, and, finally, a business model that regards trade partners, shareholders, land-sellers, local politicians, manufacturers, and, especially, team members as customers in a customer-focused operation may add up to the cycle-resilient enterprise home building firms are ever trying to be.

Intellectual property is the new lot pipeline.