Cian is Russia’s leading digital real-estate platform, bringing together all market participants. The company develops digital services for both the primary and secondary markets, offering users a wide selection of high-quality listings for the sale and rental of various types of real estate. Cian’s key advantage is its role as a guide: the platform helps users compare properties, use smart search and an AI assistant, see the true value of real estate based on independent valuation and analytics, receive expert consultations, and ensure transaction security. This advantage is built on 25 years of expertise and the depth of its vertical data. More than 20 million users visit the platform each month, over 2 million current listings are posted, and the database accuracy rate is 99%.
Problem
The proptech services market is a highly competitive environment, where several major players compete for leadership in audience awareness, usage, and preference. Media weight in this market is shaped not only by the budget invested directly in real estate, but also by a brand’s presence in higher-frequency categories of the audience’s everyday life. This gives multi-vertical platforms a constant presence in the information space—something unavailable to a single-category player with comparable investment. Cian is a specialized player in the real-estate sector, and in recent years it has become increasingly difficult for the brand to maintain its position on key perception metrics—awareness, usage, and preference—compared with competitors whose portfolios are broader. Increasing media weight proportionally would have meant multiplying the budget without a guaranteed result, so a different decision was made: not to compete in volume, but to make what already exists as effective as possible—to bring brand communication to the highest possible consistency and achieve channel synergy. To do this, Cian needed to formulate a single brand role that would: 1. Extend across all business verticals—new developments, the secondary market, rentals, suburban, and commercial real estate. 2. Be able to serve as the foundation for a unified communication platform and creative framework. Objective: Increase the effectiveness of existing brand awareness, make communication consistent and recognizable across all business verticals, and convert awareness into preference—without increasing the budget. Task 1: Formulate a unified brand role for Cian that extends across all verticals, differentiates the brand from other category players, and reflects the product’s key advantages. Task 2: Develop a set of brand codes and creative solutions that consistently communicate this role across all channels and verticals. Task 3: Establish the new role in brand perception—make it legible and recognizable in communication, including independently of individual elements such as the logo. Expected results: 1. Retain leadership in brand awareness and parity in usage—not lose what has already been achieved. 2. Increase conversion from brand awareness to preference—narrow the gap at the “remembered the brand—chose the brand” stage. 3. Ensure the brand role is legible in communication and differentiated from other category players. 4. Create a sustainable communication element (a brand code) that is recognizable without the logo and applicable across all verticals, enabling awareness to grow in the future without a proportional increase in the media budget.
Solution
In proptech advertising, it is common to sell a lifestyle or a dream home—as if all a person has to do is choose, while the service takes care of everything else. But our qualitative research showed that the audience does not believe this. People are not ready to relinquish control over real-estate matters—they need to understand things and make their own decisions. This turns dealing with real estate into a second job. Without a reliable guide through a complex process, people get stuck comparing options for a long time: before moving into a property, they first need to get to know the real-estate market. While the category promised a ready-made “dream outcome,” Cian decided to focus on the real process: to show that a person is capable of figuring out any real-estate issue themselves while still having time to live. And Cian helps them get through this journey faster. This led to the “Cian Helps You Get It” platform — with two meanings at once: to make sense of something complex and make a decision, as well as to move home and get closer to a new stage of life. The creative communicates the brand’s renewed role—as a guide through the complex world of real estate — and brings the brand closer to people. At the center of the communication is the real lives of people for whom real estate is not a problem, but an everyday task. The dynamic line made it possible to scale the concept across different business verticals. Thus, the formula “a person + their question + real help from the brand” became the recognizable foundation of Cian’s communication. While the category talks about reliability and ease of transaction, Cian talks about what happens before the transaction — the decision-making process itself, a space that no one in the market has deliberately claimed. This is not a one-off slogan, but a role that fits every vertical and can serve as a permanent communication platform. The brand role was communicated through a repeatable system, unified across all channels but adapted to their place in the user journey. At the awareness stage, brand films revealed the brand’s renewed role and carried unified brand codes — a layer of communication intended to be understood consistently across all verticals. At the consideration stage, they were complemented by product films tailored to the needs of specific verticals — new developments, the secondary market, rentals, suburban, and commercial real estate—translating the brand role into concrete product proof. Influencer communication and content integrations worked to build closeness with the audience and engagement — a format that naturally supported a sense of ease and enjoyment in interacting with the brand. Out-of-home advertising and in-app communication provided additional reach and a reminder of the brand role at the moment of decision-making. This channel mix reached users at different stages of their journey—from discovering the brand’s new role to choosing a specific property — within a unified creative system, without increasing the media budget.
Results
The overall objective was to make Cian’s communication recognizable and consistent under limited media budgets. The objective of the first advertising campaign was to strengthen differentiation from other category players by introducing the brand’s new role. Three indicators were used as benchmarks: 1. Significantly improve metrics at each stage of the funnel: awareness, consideration, and preference. 2. Ensure that the brand role is clearly understood in communication. 3. Create communication elements that help build brand and advertising awareness faster. **Results achieved:** 1. Metrics improved at every stage of the funnel. Comparing people with confirmed ad exposure to those without it, the exposed group showed increases of 13 percentage points in Top of Mind awareness, 11 percentage points in unaided awareness, 12 percentage points in usage, and 12 percentage points in preference. Conversion from unaided awareness to usage reached its highest level in 2.5 years—88%. 2. The brand role was clearly understood in communication: 67–74% of viewers identified the stated role of guide in the communication. 3. Communication elements were created that help build brand and advertising awareness. In just three months, the new brand line became associated with Cian among 27% of respondents, surpassing key competitors. Among debranded films, 63% of respondents correctly identified Cian as the brand, compared with the previous average of 43%. People began to remember the brand not only by its color, but also by other brand cues that were successfully scaled.
