Somewhere in the distant corners of my memory is a story about a lion in a warehouse…

(Or possibly a panther.)

The details have become slightly unreliable with age, which is annoying, because I would love to know whether any photographs still exist.

The story, as I remember it, came from a conversation with the head of marketing at what was then Slough Estates. This would have been around the time we first started working with them in 1998, although the campaign itself may well have been earlier.

At some point in the 1990s, they had apparently commissioned a photo shoot inside one of their warehouses involving a large live animal - complete, one assumes, with a trainer and a fairly nervous risk assessment.

The idea was simple enough.

A standard photograph of a large empty warehouse can only say so much. A big cat standing inside one says something else entirely.

• Scale.

• Power.

• Presence.

You may think that sounds unusual.

It was.

But it was also rather effective thinking for its time.

And clearly memorable, because nearly thirty years later I am still talking about it.

“It’s Just a Shed”

I mention this because we have been talking to industrial property clients for nearly thirty years about the possibilities of their marketing, and in that time one phrase has come up more than almost any other.

You have probably heard it yourself.

You may even have said it.

“It’s just a shed.”

That phrase does a lot of damage.

Not because it is entirely wrong. A warehouse is, among other things, a large building designed to store and move things.

But because of what it implies about ambition.

If the product is just a shed, then the marketing can be just a brochure.

1. A floor plan.

2. A render.

3. An aerial photograph.

4. A brief description of available square footage.

Job done.

The trouble is that nobody really buys that way.

Or, at least, nobody pays attention that way.

Dull Products Still Need Attention

Think about the industries that have had to work hardest to make people care about something spectacularly dull.

• Car insurance.

• Utility bill comparison.

• Broadband switching.

These are not naturally thrilling categories. They have no obvious visual appeal, no emotional pull, and no particular reason for anyone to stop what they are doing and pay attention.

And yet Compare the Market built a cultural phenomenon around animated meerkats.

Go Compare found an opera singer with an enormous moustache and turned him into someone so irritating that he became impossible to ignore. (No offence Wynne.)

Neither campaign was really about the product.

They were about attention.

Industrial property is not consumer advertising, of course.

Nobody is suggesting that a logistics park needs a mascot, a jingle or a small fictional animal with a questionable accent.

But the basic challenge is not completely different.

• People are busy.

• Attention is limited.

• Facts alone rarely make something memorable.

And that matters, because industrial property has much more of a story than it often allows itself to tell.

More Than a Metal Box

If you believe you are marketing a shed, you will market it like a shed: factually, efficiently and without much imagination.

But a logistics facility serving a major e-commerce network is not a shed in any meaningful sense.

It is infrastructure.

It is a node in a supply chain that gets products to people’s doors before they have quite finished expecting them.

It supports retailers, manufacturers, supermarkets, construction projects and entire distribution networks.

• It has operational intensity.

• It has scale.

• It has movement.

• It has purpose.

The question is whether the marketing reflects any of that.

Too often, it does not.

The building may be commercially important, technically sophisticated and strategically located, but the marketing still says:

Here is the square footage.

Here is the clear height.

Here is the yard depth.

Here is a CGI of the front.

All useful.

But not always enough.

A Few Signs of Change

There are signs that the sector is beginning to stretch a little.

We have seen a whale placed inside a warehouse on LinkedIn to demonstrate scale.

We have seen dinosaurs used to make clear height instantly understandable.

We have seen more developers using short films, teaser campaigns, motion graphics, drone footage and operational storytelling to explain not just what a building looks like, but why it matters.

These ideas still stand out because they are not yet the norm.

That is the opportunity.

The point is not that every warehouse needs a gimmick.

It is that every scheme needs an idea.

A live lion in a warehouse was one way of making people look twice.

In 2026, we have far more tools available.

• Cinematic films.

• Coming-soon teasers.

• Operational cutaways.

• Animated scale comparisons.

• Social-first edits.

• Interactive presentations.

• CGIs that show not just the box, but the life, movement and value around it.

Used well, these tools can do more than fill a space on a website.

1. They can stop the scroll.

2. Make scale instantly understandable.

3. Create anticipation.

4. Add a sense of drama.

5. Make the functional feel commercially significant.

They do not require a live animal and a trainer.

Which is probably for the best.

The Ambition Gap

The lion - or panther, or whatever it actually was - has stuck with me because it represented something important.

Someone looked at a large empty warehouse and decided it needed more than a straightforward photograph.

They decided the marketing needed an idea.

That instinct still feels relevant.

Perhaps more relevant than ever.

Industrial buildings are larger, smarter, more automated and more important to everyday life than they were in the 1990s.

The tools available to communicate them are also considerably more powerful.

The question is whether the ambition has kept up.

Because if we keep describing these buildings as “just sheds”, we should not be surprised when the marketing behaves accordingly.

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