When you look at branding, there’s a big payoff in looking at your own infrastructure. The payoff can be as great or greater if you look beyond it to the infrastructure of targeted customers.

An increasingly mobile consumer surely pays attention to hotspots for cell phones. That mentality is now transforming itself into a total attitude toward infrastructure. People are migrating to hotspots when infrastructure of any sort becomes part of the buying proposition.

MSN did a survey of real estate buying trends in 2012. Among the findings: “Infill is in.” Migrating to new real estate beyond current conurbations can have huge infrastructure costs. Dodging the burden of new roadways and sewer systems is a fresh survival path. The average residence shopper is much more acutely aware: You don’t just buy or rent a residence. You connect with an entire resource network from plumbing hookups to public education.

How does your brand fare when measured against its own infrastructure implications:

• If your products are service intensive, how difficult is it for your customers to navigate to service facilities?

• Is your brand invisibly tied to supply-chain paths like roadways and retail outlets that are either deteriorating or undergoing drastic change?

• Can you link your brand to infrastructural channels – such as increases in home deliveries that have grown with e-tailing and Internet shopping?

• Are there brand-tailoring opportunities that tie easily to “infill” thinking? Are you considering housing and home-furnishing sizing that suits new snuggle-up housing in older residential communities? This also includes offering solutions to crowding and congestion that the shift may bring.

Brand imagery has long been associated with the freshest face of how we think about homesteading. But homesteading is no longer the expansive, virgin-territory thinking of past generations. Attractive new homesteads are increasingly those attachable to pre-planted or redeployed infrastructure. The upshot suggests a whole new plug-in scenario for brand connectivity.