New Report on Marketing Effectiveness in Architectural Lighting
The free report examines what tariffs, AI-mediated discovery, and channel consolidation are doing to the way the industry wins work through 2027.
Cincinnati-based brand strategy and marketing firm W.Bradford has published “Specified or Forgotten,” an industry report on the state of marketing effectiveness in commercial and architectural lighting.
The report examines what tariffs, AI-mediated discovery, and channel consolidation are doing to the way the industry wins work through 2027 and is available at no cost here.
The report arrives at a defined moment. National architecture billings have contracted for 41consecutive months, and the AIA Consensus Construction Forecast projects nonresidential spending essentially flat in real terms through 2027. Against that backdrop, the report argues that 2027 is a positioning year rather than a recovery year, and that the plans written between now and Q4 will decide which brands enter the next cycle with a position and which enter it with a price list.
“Most manufacturers could stop developing new products for a full year and still grow, if they would only sell what they already have more clearly,” said Will Sears, founder and CEO of W.Bradford. “The catalogs are full. The stories are empty. That gap is the growth.”
Specified or Forgotten rests on three layers of evidence: institutional research including the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Binet and Field’s effectiveness studies, and Bain and Google’s buyer research; a structured survey answered by 11 executives across manufacturing, rep agencies, and lighting technology; and more than 25 hours of recorded field conversations with manufacturers, rep principals, and specifiers conducted between March and July 2026.
Named contributors include Dan Montante, Managing Director of LED Linear USA; Tom Howe, VP of Sales at Kelvix; Dawn Andersen, Director of Global Marketing at Luminii; Colin Hough, Senior Marketing Manager at B-K Lighting; Benjamin Rapkin, CIO of chatLED; Michael Dernaj, Partner at LUXLYT; and AJ Hetzke, founder of IlluminFx Lighting Systems, alongside three senior channel leaders who contributed anonymously.
Findings include the industry’s structural underinvestment in brand relative to activation, the decline of the spec sheet as the channel’s primary interface, the unclaimed position in networked controls education, and the movement of early-stage product research into AI-mediated channels that read manufacturer product data whether or not it was prepared to be read.
Industry Report №02 is scheduled for January 2027, with an expanded contributor survey opening in Q4 2026. Contributors to №01 receive first access.
