Fifteen years into his career in the new construction industry, Will Duderstadt still strives to carry the mind and energy of an outside voice.
For the vice president and chief marketing officer of M/I Homes, recognized by BUILDER as one of the industry’s top CMOs, this means not getting hung up on industry jargon and phrases as well as not doing things a certain way because that is how they have always been done. While industry insiders and companies are hyper-focused on interest rates and rate buydowns, Duderstadt says the average consumer does not know what the current rate is, nor do they understand how it impacts their bottom line.
“We’ve made a lot of progress by shifting the way we talk about it to lower payments,” he notes. “You can have a lower payment with this 2-1 buydown program. You don’t need to understand the nuances of that buydown; you need to understand what your monthly payment is going to be in year one and year two.”
This small pivot in marketing messaging has paid dividends for M/I Homes. Duderstadt says consumers are interacting with website material, marketing emails, and ads at a higher frequency than when messages were mortgage rate-centric.
“I try to lean on that and I always try to go back to, ultimately, what does the consumer want?” Duderstadt says. “What enriches their life and what words and phrases are they using to talk about their problems and challenges and, eventually, solutions?”
Duderstadt’s consumer-first mindset formed well before he entered the home building industry.
He traces much of his marketing education to the five years he spent at Apple in the early 2000s. Before annual releases of the new iPhone, he watched a company build stories around its product rather than simply recite product specifications.
“A masterful company when it comes to creating stories, compelling messaging, and really making a product desirable,” Duderstadt says of his time at Apple. “I learned the vast majority of my marketing skills there.”
After leaving Apple, Duderstadt tested these acquired marketing skills in an arena with less glitz and glamor than the Macbook and iPods. In the material science sector, marketing products including glass viscometer and dilatometers, Duderstadt was spotlighting products that were more challenging. If Apple represented a brand and a set of products he naturally loved, material sciences represented a different challenge.
“I honed a lot of skills and realized that, although I’m pretty good at what I do, it really helps when you’re also really passionate about it,” he says.
The home building industry represented a natural step for Duderstedt. His family has a long history in home building, and the deeply emotional and innately personal process of buying a home provides a perfect canvas for creating compelling stories as a marketer.
He joined M/I Homes roughly 15 years ago as the company’s sole digital marketer. Duderstadt remembers uploading every home photo to the website manually and starting the builder’s Facebook page. The home building sector has traditionally been a technology laggart, and that was the case 15 years ago, leaving plenty of room to experiment.
The early responsibilities help establish a mentality that Duderstadt has carried as he climbed through M/I Homes’ ranks and the builder grew from $900 million in revenue to more than $4 billion in revenue. The corporate marketing group has grown from roughly five or six people when Duderstadt arrived to nearly 25 today. He still describes the team as a “small, but mighty group.”
“My career at M/I has really just been the result of a lot of successive wins that just get bigger and more impactful over time,” Duderstadt adds.
Selling the Feeling
One key area Duderstadt’s outsider’s perspective manifests is his admiration of how non-home building companies market their products. The messaging from Apple, Bose, and high-end car manufacturers focuses less on technical specifications and more on the experience those products create and how people can feel.
“If you’re shopping for Bose speakers, you’re not going to see the wattage or the amperage or the throughput on those speakers in the headline,” Duderstadt says. “They’re important. They’re later, you can discover and find them, but they’re not selling you individual features. They’re selling you a feeling.”
Home builders, Duderstadt says, can take many cues from this approach. One three-bed, two-bath house may not materially look all that different from another three-bed, two-bath house when the specs are listed next to each other. The opportunity for marketers is to communicate how the final product is greater than the sum of its parts.
This philosophy is showing up in the increasingly personalized ways M/I Homes is marketing to leaders. The builder has begun sending hyper-personalized emails that can surface information about a particular home a shopper was looking at or share updates about a community a person had expressed interest in.
“That’s incredibly powerful,” Duderstadt says. “That allows the customer to feel like that email was crafted just for them. Because, in many cases, it was.”
Personalization also offers a solution to another challenge facing not just the home building industry. Buyers of any product want information and transparency. However, not every shopper is searching for the same thing. A buyer with an engineer’s mindset may want to understand insulation or structural details, while a design-minded buyer could care more about architectural features, finishes, and selections. Others may care about price above all else.
“Figuring out how you deliver the right content to the right person as content overall increases, that’s where magic starts to happen for a marketer,” Duderstadt explains.
Moving Digital Target
While the industry was initially skeptical about whether buyers would shop for homes online the same way they do other commodities, builders have had to adjust as shoppers are continuing to begin their home buying journey online. No longer a differentiator, transparent information on community amenities, available homes, and floor plans are expected by buyers, in many cases before they even engage with the sales team or visit a model home.
This presents a paradox for builders, as Duderstadt views it. Being ahead of the industry is increasingly fleeting. Interactive floor plans, renderings of homes that have not been built, and other tools can provide a temporary advantage, but eventually adoption spreads and expectations are reset. One day’s differentiator becomes tomorrow’s baseline. For Duderstadt, it is not a digital element or feature that is essential, instead it is transparency.
“We need to tell our consumers more. They’re craving more,” he explains. “We need to position it in a way that tells a story, so that it’s not overwhelming, because there is a lot to talk about.”
The next evolution of ‘more’ in marketing may be showing some of the less glamorous portions of the home. The garage may be an area of interest for a renter looking to buy; closet size may be important for a first move-up buyer; and storage may be important for a family with holiday decorations.
“If people are going to start truly ruling out options online, the [impact of the] absence of talking about closets when other people are talking about closets is going to be real,” Duderstadt notes. “Buyers evaluate properties in their head [on these qualities] as they walk them. We should meet them where they want to be and start talking about that online.”
The Human Touch in an AI World
In a world continuously inundated with artificial intelligence-generated text and images, Duderstadt says marketers face a balancing act.
While bullish on its usefulness, describing marketers who effectively leverage AI as “the bionic man,” Duderstadt says AI is best as a multiplier, not a replacement. Duderstadt is pushing back against “AI slop” and believes that as more AI-generated content is produced, there will be advantages for companies leading with a human touch.
“I believe that as more consumer-facing content is generated purely by AI, that really shines a positive light back on human-generated content. Emotional, real, sometimes a little flawed, often peculiar because it is written like a person thinks,” Duderstadt says. “People have the benefit of living in homes; AI does not. When you talk about certain experiences, it can mimic but can’t quite inspire that same emotion.”
While it is difficult to predict which tools and campaigns will define the near-term future of new-home marketing, Duderstadt expects success to come from companies that lead with authenticity.
“Some ability to know that it is accurate and real. I think it’s going to become increasingly important,” he notes. “Whenever you start to create doubt for the consumer, it is a hard, hard, long journey to recover that trust.”
Building a Career on Wins
Whether it is messaging about payment instead of rate or a personalized follow-up message, it is often difficult to attribute every action that influenced a home sale. Duderstadt, instead, places a high value on a marketers ability to influence demand.
Calls about properties, website leads, and walk-in traffic all provide signals that demand is being activated even in a market where the headlines are telling consumers not to buy.
“In tough markets, demand that shows up is of higher quality. Because despite all the reasons the press is telling someone it’s a bad time to buy a home, they’re still calling us,” Duderstadt says. “We lean on demand to be really the thing we know we can influence.”
The same difficult environment calls back to the most important advice Duderstadt has received in his career and his advice for marketers building their own careers: Say yes.
“Say yes to every opportunity, every request for help from either a colleague or a manager, even when it feels like it’s slightly outside your job description or your comfort zone,” he adds. “Careers are built in tough markets. If you’re demoralized and you give up and let the market define how you act and the work you do, you’re not going to have many wins under your belt.”
Duderstadt encourages marketers to take calculated, bold swings when conditions are challenging. A win earned under pressure can become a defining moment after the market turns.
With such professional intensity, Duderstadt is also a strong believer that being “100% off” when he leaves work is just as important as being “100% on” when he is on the clock. For him, that means getting outside, gardening, and separating himself from the phone. Time connecting with nature and soaking in sunshine allows him to return to work fully ready to be present again.
It is another lesson built around knowing when to tune out noise. Whether that noise is industry jargon, AI-generated content, or messages about how difficult the housing market is for builders.
Fifteen years into his career in home building, maintaining an outsider’s perspective is just as important to Duderstadt. The next win, after all, is unlikely to come from doing something because that is how it always has been done.
