REQUEST INVITE
Imagine you're the CEO of a senior living company building a 28-story tower in Sydney. You're at level 17, with a new floor going up every 10 days. And you realize your entire design is wrong. What do you do?
That was the decision Kevin McCoy, CEO of Levande in Australia, had to make. At SLIF, he shared how that choice, along with a radically customer-focused approach, helped build brand awareness from 12% to 40% in just eight weeks.
Looking Through the Customer's Eyes
Kevin's transformation started about 10 years ago when he became CEO and shadowed a care worker. The worker served a single mom whose 12-year-old daughter had about 20 epileptic fits per day. The mom's biggest problem? The care worker changed often without warning, causing massive anxiety.
"Their lives were difficult enough and we were making them even harder for reasons that best suited our company," Kevin explained. "What mattered most for her is who came through the door. From then on I stopped looking at the business through spreadsheets and I started to look through it through the customer's eyes."
That's why today, Kevin visits each of Levande's 59 villages twice a year. He never leaves without "an absolute gem of information." The statement he hears most often? "I wish I'd done it sooner."
"I wish I'd moved into retirement living sooner," Kevin clarified. "That tells me we have a great product as an industry, we just don't package it up and sell it particularly well."
What Boomers Actually Want
Kevin introduced Gail and Paul, residents in their mid-70s who looked for five years before finding the right fit. His research on Australian boomers revealed specific insights:
Choice, control, and agency. Flexible services, simple transparent contracts, and assurance of support when needed.
Space to live, not just space to stay. High-end designs, layouts supporting aging in place, and bigger units—two beds plus a study, three beds plus a study, and "the biggest carport they can find."
Status matters. They want to be seen as moving up, not down. They want a place they can boast about to their friends.
"Boomers are generally all about me," Kevin explained. "We're finding a shift more to consumer-led rather than product-led."
The Cambridge Pivot
The Cambridge—one of the tallest senior living communities in the world at 28 stories—had 172 units in the original design, with only 13 three-bedrooms. In presale, all 13 went "in a heartbeat."
So at level 17, with a new floor every 10 days, they threw out all plans for levels 20-26 and redesigned. "It's a tough day when you darken the door of the architect, the builder and the local planning authority and they have their own WTF moment," Kevin admitted.
The result? They added 28 more three-bedroom units, creating the "Oxford Collection" as a premium sub-brand. Total: 41 three-beds.
And Gail and Paul? They're on level 22. "But for that, we would not have had Gail and Paul as our wonderful residents."
Building a Brand from Zero
When Kevin joined Levande three years ago, the company had no brand awareness and "pretty much no customer value proposition." He saw an opportunity to do something bold.
His first move? Look outside senior living for talent. "I deliberately searched for talent outside of senior living. I didn't want to go around the houses on things again." He recruited from consumer packaged goods companies because "they have the best brand maturity and the disciplines and processes that we needed."
The research revealed three universal needs: certainty (removing ambiguity and doubt), freedom (lightening the daily load without feeling fenced in), and fulfillment (cultivating contentment and connection).
Most importantly, they discovered a massive perception gap. Among retirees not living in retirement communities, about a third saw it as very negative. But among those actually living in Levande villages? Almost 90% saw it as very positive.
"This gap represented not just a big opportunity for us, but a huge opportunity for the whole sector."
Everyday Exceptional
From this research came Levande's brand promise: "Expect More." The tagline: "Retirement, Living"—with a deliberate comma.
"We like the power of punctuation," Kevin explained. "A simple comma can change the perception of a whole market category."
The campaign concept, "Everyday Exceptional," focuses on a simple truth: life is full of simple pleasures, but only in older years do we have the time and headspace to really appreciate them. Brand awareness jumped from 12% to 37% in eight weeks and now holds at 40%.
"I always walk through airports on branded and I'm amazed at how many people come up to me and go, 'I like your ad,'" Kevin shared. "I just give them a keyring I carry in my pocket so they can join the cult."
The Bottom Line
True to the bold approach, Levande pulled off "Seniors Take the Leap" at the Cambridge opening this past November. Kevin and several residents abseiled down the 28-story building to meet the chairman on level five to cut the ribbon.
Three retirees abseiling down the side of a 28-story tower.
With a $2 billion construction pipeline and plans to open two to three villages per year, Levande is proving that bold bets on customer insight pay off. As Kevin put it: "We believe none of this would've been possible but for the simple but firm mindset of being curious about customers, understanding that this generation of retirees is different to those past, and asking—not assuming—that we know what they want, and not being afraid to do things differently and take a chance."
Watch the full talk below...
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