In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with David Kessler, founder and CEO of Starfish, the New York brand and creative agency he has led since 2002. Before founding Starfish, David held senior roles at Hill Holliday, FCB, Lowe & Partners, and Griffin Bacal/DDB. They discuss why so many commercial real estate rebrands look the same, how landlords can market the return to office, how family offices should approach a rebrand, and why authenticity will matter more as AI reshapes how brands are found. For the full analysis, read our breakdown of the episode.
Gordon Lamphere (00:06): Hey, welcome back to The Real Finds Podcast. Today we’re joined by David Kessler, founder and CEO of Starfish. David has worked on some of the most recognizable brand work of the past two decades, including the coffee positioning behind Dunkin’s iconic “America Runs on Dunkin’,” and some major commercial real estate rebrands, including Penn Station for Vornado, Moynihan Train Hall, and the Seagram Building.
In this episode, we dig into why so many real estate rebrands look exactly the same, and how landlords can market the return to office by inspiring rather than mandating. We also tackle why authenticity, and not AI slop, will ultimately win, and why the majority of B2B searches, even though they run through AI, still deserve a personal touch. Let’s get into it.
David, thanks for hopping on the podcast today.
David Kessler: Pleasure.
Gordon Lamphere: So what got you into the world of real estate marketing? It’s an interesting niche, and it’s so critical these days for properties and brands. What got you interested?
David Kessler (01:22): Our real estate work started about ten, twelve years ago. And to clarify, our real estate work is mostly commercial properties, large-scale commercial properties. I got a phone call from the head of marketing at Vornado, the large New York City real estate developer and owner. They were thinking about their Penn Station property. They own two million square feet over at Penn Station, and they wanted to rebrand it. That’s what got us into it. We did that first project.
Ever since then, look, it’s a relatively small community. Brokers talk to brokers, real estate developers talk to real estate developers, and we get recommended from there. So we’ve done a number of large-scale rebrands for large commercial properties. It’s a fascinating category.
Quite frankly, some developers and building owners are much more sophisticated than others. Some just want a facelift, and some want to really talk about what we would call brand strategy. How do we position our property to be more compelling to tenants? And then COVID happened. In New York, I don’t know how many tens of millions of square feet went vacant, and for how long. So there was a tremendous need to market these properties. It became a very competitive space.
Gordon Lamphere (03:21): How has brand strategy shifted since you got into the business?
David Kessler: I think we’ll talk about AI at the end, because that’s probably what’s on people’s minds first and foremost. But how has brand strategy changed in the context of commercial real estate? It has certainly become more sophisticated, largely because the marketplace has become more competitive. Building owners and real estate brokers, the gatekeepers in your world, now have to really dig in and understand the needs of the tenants. And because the needs of the tenants have changed, brand strategy has needed to become more sophisticated and more anchored in what we call customer insights. What do the tenants really want? What do they need?
What you’ve seen in a lot of properties is the build-out of amenities. What’s been driving that is tenants needing to create attractive places to lure their employees back to work. Working from home was, on one level, very isolating, and on the other, very beneficial to employees. Even with our own employees, it is hard to get people back into the office. The flexibility of rolling out of bed, putting on a pair of shorts and maybe a decent shirt, that’s a big benefit. So tenants required it, landlords have had to adjust their offering, and that gets translated into brand strategy.
Brand strategy really goes back to a deep understanding of what drives your customers’ needs and perspectives. So to come full circle, it’s gotten more sophisticated. It’s dug much deeper into understanding the end customer’s needs.
Now, how has AI impacted branding? It’s very interesting. Can you use AI to build a brand strategy? Yes, absolutely. Can you use AI to build a unique brand strategy? Not necessarily. Just like anything else, it is a tool, and the tool is only as good as what you feed it and how you use it. If you give it a general question, it’s going to give you a general answer. If you ask it to develop a brand strategy for a property and don’t give it specificity, you’re going to get a vanilla package back, and that’s not going to be differentiated. At the end of the day, any brand, real estate or not, needs a soul. It needs humanity and authenticity, and that comes from people who understand it, who have lived life and have perspective.
Gordon Lamphere (07:17): And how do you create that perspective?
David Kessler: I think it comes from people who have lived and who have insight, and from using the research. When we develop a brand for anything, real estate or not, we ask three things. Number one, what is true to this brand at its core, in terms of what it’s offering and the benefits it offers its customers? Number two, does it meet the needs, including the inherent and unspoken needs, of those customers? And three, is it competitively differentiated? At the end of the day, it has to be unique.
So it’s the people crafting these strategies and brands who have to come up with a unique point of view. For a real estate property, it’s location, it’s amenities, it’s the architecture of the building. You have to take all of those things into consideration, and then you formulate a strategy. And you don’t just do one. You develop a handful, because some may be flavors of the same thing and others might be a completely different perspective.
Gordon Lamphere (08:51): What do you think are the biggest branding mistakes companies are making these days in the real estate world? What are the critical errors you’re seeing?
David Kessler: In anything, it’s a lack of differentiation. Everybody’s saying the same thing in slightly different ways. I also think people are using AI to create imagery that lacks depth and realism. It’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s easy, but it lacks authenticity and true feeling. Those are the mistakes people are making. They’re using AI too much as a craft.
It absolutely has a role. Once you have your brand and the way you want to be positioned, you can use it from a production standpoint. You can use it to resize assets. If you have a brochure and want a smaller version, you can certainly use it for that. But don’t use it to design the main essence of your brand.
Gordon Lamphere: We’ve definitely found within our own marketing that AI has been very helpful with things like the structure of our website, or analyzing data sets. It’s great to go over things with a human hand, but when you’re talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of data points, it’s a little more efficient to use a robot.
In terms of differentiation, one of the things I’ve noticed about your firm is that you’ve really been a category leader in helping brands differentiate. So how does a brand truly differentiate? And can you give us an example of a brand you’ve successfully differentiated from the competition?
David Kessler (11:13): What I like to say is there are three data feeds that inform any brand. Number one is the attributes and characteristics of the organization internally: the blood that runs through your veins, the DNA of the organization, what you believe in. Those pieces absolutely have to be part of the brand. Sometimes people try to create a brand that is purely customer facing and just tells customers what they want to hear. That is not going to result in an authentic brand. Authenticity comes from the company’s beliefs.
Number two, the brand has to meet the needs of its constituents, its customers, the analysts in the category, whoever that may be. It has to deliver on the needs and unmet needs of those customers. And number three, as we said before, it has to be competitive. It has to be unique.
We’ve developed a variety of processes and tools to do that. One is a framework we’ve branded, and it has a number of inputs. We look at attributes and core competencies, needs, ambitions, and a competitive assessment. Based on all of that, we map it out and ask: what’s the territory we can own that is true and authentic to who we are, and that others cannot say? When you do branding, one of the things you want to do is put your hand over the logo and ask, “Can others say this?” You get to a great brand when others cannot say it.
As for an example, we’ve done so many of them, but probably the most famous goes back a number of years: Dunkin’ Donuts, “America Runs on Dunkin’.” For many years, Dunkin’ ran campaigns around “Time to make the donuts.” But when you really dug into the company and its soul, and we did the research and went to a hundred Dunkin’ Donuts around the country, the secret of that brand, and where they made their money, was coffee. “America Runs on Dunkin'” is what we call a coffee positioning. It’s all about the coffee.
What you started to find was an obsession, both internally within the company and externally with customers, about their coffee. We went all through New England, because that’s where they started, and customers would tell you there was almost an urban legend that they put something in the coffee because it was so different. The reality was something called the SureShot machine. Human beings love consistency, and these machines put the same amount of sugar and the same amount of milk into your cup of coffee every time. We’re creatures of habit, so people loved that cup of coffee because it was so consistent.
Now, did they go to great lengths to source a better bean and a better roast, and throw away coffee after twenty minutes? Yes. But the company did all those things, and the customer had that need. That’s an example. And this was at a time when Starbucks was at its pinnacle, and Dunkin’ really needed to establish its credentials and credibility in coffee. “Coffee creds” is what we referred to it as.
Gordon Lamphere (15:59): I definitely run on Dunkin’, so I’m not going to say anything negative about the brand, and one of the admins down the hall is a big Dunkin’ fan as well. One area where I’ve been a particular fan of your work is how you’ve marketed return to work and return to the office. We continually talk with our landlords, and some of our occupiers, about how you can frame that shift in either a positive or a negative way. How do you see the most effective ways for landlords or occupiers to market that move?
David Kessler: We’re based in New York, so we see it from that perspective. New York is heavily concentrated in financial services, and whether it’s a compliance issue or a management issue, most financial services organizations have required people back five days a week. Those organizations didn’t necessarily position it as a positive thing. It was, “This is it, we’re back. If you don’t like it, find another job.” I don’t think they handled it correctly, and I think they’ve had their fallout in terms of people leaving.
Gordon Lamphere (18:03): If you’re Jamie Dimon and you say, “You better be back in the office,” it’s a lot easier to say than if you’re just some jamoke.
David Kessler: That’s exactly the case. And in anything, it is always better to inspire people. Use the carrot, not the stick. How do I inspire you back? That’s why landlords have built what they’ve built. In real estate there are a number of dynamics. The landlords are marketing to the tenants, so in some ways they’re listening to the tenants, and what they have to do is create an environment people want to come back to. There are great amenities, there’s a gym, there’s food. It becomes a place you want to be.
Some of it borrows from the Starbucks brand, if you study it. The Starbucks brand was built on the premise of what they called the third place. You had home, you had work, and then you had Starbucks, a place you wanted to hang out. You would do your work, or hang out with friends. A lot of these properties have adopted that third place mindset. How do I provide amenities that make this a place you want to be and want to spend time at?
I also think younger segments, like millennials and Gen Z, have started to feel that the isolation of working from home was not healthy. The social aspect of getting back to work, being in a room with people, talking about your weekend, or just working together, is a healthier environment, socially and psychologically. I think we’re starting to see that.
The rub is the convenience factor. Which is why I think, from a societal standpoint, the majority of organizations are probably going to end up back in a hybrid manner. Like us. We’re back three days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I haven’t done a survey or a study, but I would think that’s probably the norm. Will companies ever go back five days? I don’t know. The jury’s out on that.
Gordon Lamphere: For us, we do a pretty large transaction volume on both the landlord side and the occupier side, usually somewhere between 100 and 130 transactions a year, depending on the year. With our numbers and talking to the folks we work with, it’s probably somewhere around three and a half to four days a week. Most people have some flex days in there. There are certainly folks on the extreme at five days a week, mostly in more regulated industries, and some folks in our portfolio at one or two. But three to four is probably the norm.
David Kessler: It probably tracks with industries. We’re in the creative industry, so we’re a little more flexible, but some other industries are less so. My son works for a startup, and it’s three to four days a week.
Gordon Lamphere (21:49): When we talk about differentiators, one of the things I’ve seen you write about is how family businesses and family brands can evaluate and improve their brand structure. A huge percentage of our clients are family offices and multigenerational real estate owners. How does that process work when you’re going into a business whose brand is already so fixed? How do you approach a rebrand or an improvement of a brand identity?
David Kessler: It depends on whether we’re rebranding the family office itself or its properties. That’s something called brand architecture. Are we rebranding what we call the master brand, or are we branding properties? Very different things.
Gordon Lamphere: Of course.
David Kessler (23:01): If the organization, or a younger generation, says, “Our brand is tired, it’s old, it was created a hundred years ago, it’s time for a refresh,” that’s generally going to come from a younger generation and from someone who has the influence to say, “We’ve changed as an organization. We need to be positioned and perceived as modern and innovative.”
And you need buy-in. You can’t have a grandchild in a real estate family who has enough influence to bring the initiative to the table, but not enough influence to pull the trigger. Then it just becomes a waste of time, a nightmare, an expensive and futile exercise. Everybody has to be willing. Everyone has to understand the importance of it and understand that yes, we are on this train, and at the end of the line we are going to launch a new brand.
Along the way, there is a lot of emotional attachment to the old brand. So if the family and the company are committed to the change, sometimes you have to do extra work on a communications program: communicating to the marketplace and to customers that you are changing your name, what the new brand is, why, and what it represents. You have to dig deeper into explaining what’s happening, as opposed to just announcing, “XYZ Company is now Purple Cow.”
Gordon Lamphere (25:14): One thing I consistently see is that over the last five to ten years, so many brands, particularly in our market, Greater Chicagoland and the Midwest, have rebranded, and they all look kind of the same. I think those were very ineffective rebrands. You’ve done a lot of very effective rebrands where you’ve differentiated your clients. Why do so many brands look the same, and how do you really differentiate?
David Kessler: We’re going to air a little dirty laundry here. I think what happens is real estate firms go to agencies that only do real estate, and that’s all they’ve done for twenty years. It’s just retreading. They’re doing the same thing over and over again, so they don’t bring a new perspective.
The reason we’ve been able to be effective and unique is that we work across multiple categories. Real estate is a decent percentage of our overall business, but we also have healthcare, consumer brands, electronics, and a music company. So we’re seeing best practices and perspectives from multiple categories, and our creative and strategic people are thinking more broadly all the time. That’s how we’ve been able to bring a fresh perspective to the table.
Gordon Lamphere (26:56): When you’re bringing that fresh perspective, how do you tell the story? Can you give us an example of a building or a firm where you differentiated based on an aspect of their story, and how that played out?
David Kessler: I think the most famous one is probably the rebrand of the Seagram Building, and the effort the landlord went through to renovate the building. In that case, it was really about getting into the headset of the original architect, the person who designed that building. What were they thinking, and how do we bring that to life in a really unexpected way?
The work there leans more toward fashion than anything else. It takes cues from the fashion category. If you really study branding, the brands that have prevailed over decades, and in some cases centuries, are fashion brands. They constantly reinvent themselves. I think real estate brands need to do the same, because those buildings aren’t going anywhere. They’re going to be there for a hundred years, so you have to think about reinventing yourself over and over again to stay relevant.
Gordon Lamphere: Is there a good example of a brand that reinvented itself successfully?
David Kessler (28:56): We did the brand work for Moynihan Train Hall. We did that with [Vornado]. Moynihan is the old post office building across the street from Penn Station, and I think it was a joint venture between Vornado and New York State. It was a complete renovation, and the question was how to look at it as an experience. What is the experience of being in Moynihan like? They brought in some great food retailers, and it became, I don’t want to call it a mall, but a place you wanted to spend time, as opposed to so many stations where people just want to commute through. Take a moment and spend time here. That was the story and the idea that drove it. It was a place you wanted to be.
Gordon Lamphere: There are some malls you do want to be in. I don’t think it’s necessarily a dirty word, even though some of that product has become less desirable. One thing that has become a bit of a dirty word, though, is AI slop. As we get toward the end of the podcast, I’d love to talk about the future of AI and creativity, how so much of the slop we see out there plays into branding, and how we can brand today for AI, which is such a different structure than even five years ago.
David Kessler (30:39): We have a very strong perspective on this. We’re expanding our own offering as an agency to address this very specific point: brands are no longer just being perceived and interpreted by people. There are AI systems that, for the most part, aren’t making the decisions, not entirely. In AI commerce they might, but let’s put that aside for a moment.
I was just at a Gartner conference, and I think sixty-some percent of all B2B searches are being done via AI. Business professionals, tenants, landlords, whoever, are using AI to search for their needs. And the way AI works, it doesn’t just take your content from your website and regurgitate it back like traditional search engines do. It uses multiple sources to create a narrative, and at the end of the day, that flattens out what you’re saying. It gives a very objective perspective.
Brands and companies need to understand that and take a different approach to how they build the brand and how they market. Number one, you’ve got to build a brand with tremendous authenticity. It goes back to what we talked about: it has to be true to who you are and very differentiated. Then you have to have the discipline to express that brand consistently across every surface. The way your brand shows up in your marketing materials, on your website, in your social media, and on review sites has to be incredibly consistent, and so does the way it shows up in content.
The AI slop you’re talking about is largely content. Marketers have started to understand that they need to push out lots of content, because that’s what AI looks for, but they don’t develop that content with a point of view. It’s not that you can’t or shouldn’t use AI to develop content. Everybody does, because it’s the only way to keep up with the pace. But you need to direct it and use the tool correctly. Give it a point of view: this is what you stand for as a brand and as an organization. You need to refine that over and over again.
There are also some very specific components, what we would call a semantic architecture, that have to be built into the brand story and defined. When we do brand work, you have to define the brand, and now you also have to define the other elements you’ll use in your marketing, both for people and for the AI systems.
The AI slop is the beginning of the pendulum swinging back. The initial hype was, “Let’s use it for everything.” Now I think it’s coming back to, “It has a role, but it’s not going to replace everything. Let’s understand how to use this tool correctly, in a way that is most advantageous for our brand and represents who we are.”
Gordon Lamphere: I’ve had two or three clients over the last year who reached out to us, when we were pitching on a building or as part of the client process, and specifically chose us because another firm had what they considered too much slop in their process. There’s definitely a place for that kind of marketing, but it shouldn’t be at the forefront of what’s out there for your business.
We could talk a lot more about AI, but one question that’s become a key part of our final four is: what are we not talking about enough? You’re on the forefront of branding. What is the real estate world missing?
David Kessler: Authenticity. Soul. What we call brand soul. I think the real estate world was brought up so much on transactions. The transaction is important, but people have been chasing transactions for so long, and we’re in a different world now. You’re missing soul, you’re missing authenticity, what’s really in this brand, this building, this space. It needs to be palpable. People need to feel it. Societally and culturally, you’re already starting to see pushback on social media, where people are saying, “I need to get back to being a human being.” I think that’s what’s missing.
Gordon Lamphere (37:35): As humans, we try to look forward, but we all have a veil of ignorance about what’s happening five or ten years out. Sometimes, though, people in key positions in real estate or in marketing and branding have insight into potential futures. If you could name one thing that will have changed the most about branding or real estate ten years out, what would it be?
David Kessler (37:46): I think you’re going to see AI agents develop. You’re already starting to see it a little in the residential space, with the risk of eliminating the agent. Can a building put its space up on a marketplace directly? Will that happen? I don’t know. A lot of it depends on the role and value that brokers can establish and carve out for themselves.
But we’re going to see AI agents show up in a lot of places. People are already talking about AI commerce, where an agent knows what you want to buy and what you need on a continuous basis, and goes out and makes those transactions for you. It’s expected to be a multi-trillion-dollar business. So it’s here. Where’s it going to hit? I think it’s going to change a lot of industries, but it’s also going to give birth to new things. And where I do think it lands is that personalized service will still reign supreme.
Gordon Lamphere: We’ve definitely seen that shift already. We have agents not necessarily running the front end, but handling a lot of back-end tasks that are repetitive, and it’s reducing our need for certain personnel. At the same time, people still require a more hands-on approach for other aspects. It’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
We get a lot of emails from younger listeners who love this question: what advice would you give a young person starting out in branding? So many people are trying to figure out the world at the start of their careers. If you had one minute, what would you tell them?
David Kessler (40:23): Honestly, it’s less about branding than anything else. If you’re starting out in your career and you’ve got forty years ahead of you, make sure you love what you do. If you don’t love it, it’s going to become torturous. Find something you really enjoy, that stimulates you intellectually and is a natural extension of who you are. If it’s hard, laborious work every day, you’re not going to be good at it, and you’re not going to be happy.
Gordon Lamphere: There’s one last question we always ask before we wrap up, and it’s the whole reason we started the podcast. We think the men and women in the arena tend to know the next person to reach out to. Who should be the next guest on the podcast?
David Kessler (41:47): I’m not going to give you a specific person, but I’ll give you a discipline. A social or cultural anthropologist, someone who can give you perspective on culture and today’s cultural shifts, would be a really interesting guest. It would be a completely different perspective than a more narrowly focused interview.
Gordon Lamphere: We would love that, and if any names pop into your head, we’d love to reach out. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way?
David Kessler: Email. It’s [email protected]. You can also go to our website, starfishco.com, and reach us that way as well.
Gordon Lamphere: David, thanks for hopping on the podcast today. We learned a lot, and we’d love to have you back in the future.
David Kessler (42:58): Terrific. It’s a pleasure being here.
Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to David. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a five-star rating and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to get quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with The Real Finds Podcast, and thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.