Flex Space Brands Fly or Fail at a Community Level
Success depends on balancing local identity with a wider sense of belonging.
Jo Hart, Group Development & Marketing Director at Mantle Estates and Mantle Space Ltd explores why flex workspace brands are ultimately built, tested and protected at community level, and why multi-site operators need coherence rather than rigid consistency.
In flexible workspace, brand isn’t something you can just build
You can lay the right foundations and steer the ship in the right direction, but ultimately, it’s something your community builds and then, when fostered in the right way, protects.
In our sector, brand and community are almost one and the same.
The community, or rather communities (we’ll get into that later) you build are your brand. Without them, you just have space.
And it might be the nicest, most gorgeous space in the world, but businesses don’t buy space. They buy community.
And community building is easy to get wrong.
It’s all in the duality
Succeeding in building a strong community, and therefore brand, as a flex operator, means welcoming duality. It’s a fine balance between allowing individual site communities to blossom and also ensuring that there’s community building across sites too.
The aim isn’t consistency, per se, it’s coherence.
What’s key is neither forcing your brand on individual sites to the detriment of local community development, nor neglecting to bridge the gap between site communities and making sure your brand values are spread throughout.
Start by honouring the niche communities within each space
One of our goals is to encourage micro-communities to grow from our spaces.
For example, The Bradfield Centre is a site largely dominated by tech-forward businesses, housing startups, innovators and research projects.
Mantle has developed a thriving internal and external community in respect of this industry that is requisite of Cambridge itself, and our mission has been to cultivate relationships with the organisations and networks that matter most to its members.
This has meant listening, observing, and letting each individual space breathe.
When a building like The Bradfield Centre begins to form its own traditions and interests, usually with a gentle nudge from us, we celebrate that.
It’s these things that make each location feel authentic and meaningful to its members.
Individuality doesn’t mean fragmentation
Alongside creating zones of business community at each space, an equally important goal of Mantle’s is to make members feel part of something bigger.
Our brand values are the thread that ties every space together.
And it’s how we demonstrate these through every interaction with the business that inspires and welcomes similarly minded people and communities to develop at each location.
These values show up in every site, even if how they manifest looks different from building to building. There’s consistency in those values.
Creating shared experiences
Every Mantle Space member is invited to every Mantle Space event, no matter where it’s held. This not only encourages collaboration across sites, but also allows members to experience the different cultures at each location. They get to meet each other face-to-face and build those all-important connections across the wider Mantle Space community.
This is embodied by Go Meet events, which were established over ten years ago with this clear purpose.
Go Meet runs across all Mantle centres, with over 40 events hosted each year, each focusing on a dedicated guest speaker addressing a single core subject. The conditions for Go Meet are designed to encourage meaningful conversation between members.
Seeing online as an extension of your physical community
Social media is often an untapped tool in bridging the micro-community gaps.
Our online presence is where all those smaller site-specific communities come together in a new kind of shared space. Social media allows members from different locations to see what’s happening elsewhere, celebrate each other’s wins, and enjoy a sense of belonging that goes beyond their home base.
From an operator perspective, we use social media to:
Showcase the unique features and energy of each location
Amplify stories and successes from across all sites equally
Highlight site-specific events, but within the context of the wider community
Reinforce our brand values consistently across every site
Social media and online spaces allow us to keep the conversation flowing between communities and sites. It helps to ensure that every member and location knows that they are a very important part of the wider ecosystem. And it acts as an extension of our events too.
A great example of this is , which offers one of Mantle’s most distinctive event settings, The Walled Garden. The ideal setting has made Thremhall events particularly shareable on social media, and they have consistently been among the most well-attended events across the Mantle group.
Ultimately, flex space brands don’t succeed because of square footage, but because they earn relevance with their community.
The brands that will truly fly are those that understand their communities as ecosystems, listening first and responding authentically after.
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