A home listing begins as a pile of facts. Price. Square footage. Bedrooms. Garage bays. A rate, perhaps, printed in a type size large enough to make the rest of the advertisement look bashful. To Will Duderstadt, the facts are necessary and still incomplete. A buyer has to understand what those numbers do to a life. The rate becomes a payment. The floor plan becomes the place where someone drops a bag after work. The community becomes a route to school, a patch of grass, a familiar turn on the way home.
Duderstadt works in that gap between the database and the daydream. As vice president and chief marketing officer at M/I Homes, the Columbus-based public homebuilder, he leads what he calls an in-house agency. Its work travels through search results, email, sales centers, listings, design, and the local divisions that put a national operation into particular streets. The assignment sounds broad because it is. Homes carry a large price, a long timeline, and a dense bundle of decisions. Marketing one asks for both accuracy and imagination.
His career has been an education in both. He is an operator who writes, an introvert who takes the stage, and a marketer who remains suspicious of shortcuts. His route to the C-suite passed through early Apple, scientific instruments, rock-band films, a print magazine, and a family history full of people who could make things with their hands. The useful tension is that Duderstadt could not.
01 / Origin storyBuilt with computers
He started life in Pittsburgh, a city he describes as a land of bricks and rust. His great-grandfather founded a custom homebuilding company in the 1950s. His father taught high-school woodshop. Craft was close enough to touch, but the talent did not land evenly. Duderstadt has joked that he inherited none of the family’s practical skill. “I cannot create things physically in that way,” he said. “But I can make stuff with computers.”
That realization turned out to be less a rejection of the family trade than a change of tools. In 2001, he joined Apple before the iPod, the iPhone, or the retail stores had remade the company’s place in daily life. He spent five years there, working around events, launches, workshops, briefings, and presentations. It was a front-row lesson in what happens when technical complexity arrives in public with a clear story attached.
A career built in useful detours
Leaving Apple supplied the harder test. Duderstadt had loved the brand and its products. He wanted to know whether he understood marketing or merely understood Apple. So he moved toward a category almost comically short on consumer glamour: thermal analytical instruments used in material science. Nobody, as he later put it, buys a dilatometer for a girlfriend. He had to learn the technology, locate the benefit, and explain why one obscure machine might be better than another. The work stripped away borrowed charisma. It left the discipline of translation.
02 / The returnHousing was in the blood, digital was in the hands
There were other experiments. Duderstadt made documentary films for rock bands. In Columbus, he became a founding partner of MCLA The Lax Mag, a print magazine devoted to college lacrosse. Inside Lacrosse acquired it in December 2011. The same year, he joined M/I Homes as a marketing manager, bringing the long family orbit around building together with a career spent making information travel.
Promotions followed: digital marketing leadership, vice president of digital marketing in 2018, vice president of corporate marketing in 2020, and chief marketing officer in 2021. The industry noticed. Professional Builder selected him for its 40 Under 40 class in 2017. The National Sales and Marketing Council named him its One to Watch in 2020. Across nine appearances between 2015 and 2023, he spoke at the International Builders’ Show about the daily problems that live between a homebuilder’s inventory and a buyer’s screen.
The public honors tell one version of the rise. The more revealing version is a spreadsheet. Duderstadt’s argument for listing content begins with standards: a real price, accurate square footage, complete bedroom and garage counts, enough photography, and a process that keeps every field current. The creative campaign can wait. If the inventory is poorly described where shoppers are already looking, the brand has asked emotion to carry a factual deficit.
The Duderstadt translation layer
What the industry advertises
What a household feels
What the database holds
What a buyer imagines
What a system distributes
What consistency creates
“If you give them the content they want, they don’t have to go someplace else.”Will Duderstadt, speaking at SMX East
03 / Attention with a jobWhen too many leads are not enough
Duderstadt is not allergic to a hook. He once worked with partners on a playful quiz that asked shoppers whether a new or resale home fit them better. It borrowed the familiar machinery of internet personality quizzes, right down to the shareable result. People took it, posted it, and encouraged friends to join. The volume grew large enough that sales teams asked for the campaign to be turned off for a while.
A thinner case study would stop at “too many leads.” Duderstadt kept the part that complicates the win. The leads became less qualified as the net widened. The campaign had found an appetite for play, but attention and intent were not synonyms. He and the team refined the idea. A marketer’s job is not to make a chart climb in isolation. It is to understand which number climbed, why it moved, and whether the movement helped the people downstream.
His phrase for the missing ingredient in much brand content is emotional content. Homebuilding has an advantage here. A new home is already full of anticipation, personal choices, and stories about the people who draw, design, finance, sell, and assemble it. The task is not to bolt sentiment onto a floor plan. It is to reveal the human work and future life that the plan already contains.
04 / The experimentA cardboard headset, an after-hours text
In 2021, an after-hours text from Duderstadt to a member of the M/I marketing team proposed another odd bridge between information and feeling: give prospective buyers simple virtual-reality headsets so they could step inside the company’s existing Matterport tours from home. The team built a landing page, organized thousands of tours, and advertised the offer through social media, YouTube, and email.
Low-tech cardboard met high-detail tours.
The campaign put existing digital assets into a new physical format. It gave online sales consultants a reason to follow up and buyers a concrete way to explore floor plans.
About 5,000 headsets went out. The company attributed nine home sales to the effort, and the campaign received a Market Proof Award for an innovative website feature. The ratio is more useful than a vague claim of virality. It exposes the entire funnel. A playful object opened attention. Organized tours supported exploration. A person continued the conversation. Some of those conversations became homes.
05 / Operating codeWords matter, and so does leaving work
Inside his team, Duderstadt treats language as infrastructure. If someone casually calls every licensed real-estate agent a Realtor, a colleague can offer a friendly correction. The terminology also lives in a style guide, which helps new team members and informs the company’s use of AI. A document alone cannot create the habit. People have to make accuracy part of how they speak to one another.
The same preference for clear operating rules appears in his view of time. His formulation is “100% on and 100% off.” When the team is at work, be fully there. When work ends, let it end. He would rather have an intense, focused 40 hours than a smeared 50 or 60. The principle resists the modern temptation to turn every meal into content and every hobby into a business. A garden can remain a garden. Sourdough can remain bread. Time with cats does not require a growth strategy.
“Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone has them.”Will Duderstadt on why ideas improve through collaboration
He does, inevitably, bring some of the garden back to marketing. One season included roughly 30 to 40 tomato plants. A disappointing Abe Lincoln variety taught him that its name came from Illinois, not from any ramrod-straight growing habit. Weak plants create a choice: keep investing, or clear space for something that may bear more fruit. The metaphor works because Duderstadt lets the small embarrassment stay in the story.
06 / The longer viewUse the book for good
As a young Boy Scout, Duderstadt spent more than 500 nights in a tent and eventually earned Eagle Scout. He later taught more than 150 merit-badge classes to nearly 2,000 Scouts. The experience gave him a language for leaving places better than he found them. Decades later, a different sentence sharpened the same instinct.
After reading Ryan Holiday’s account of manipulative media tactics, Trust Me, I’m Lying, Duderstadt had the author sign a copy. Holiday wrote, “Use this book for good.” Duderstadt has described the inscription as a marker on his path. Marketing is an attempt to influence how people think and feel. Understanding the underhanded tactics does not require using them. It gives a marketer a clearer view of the choice.
That choice matters when the product is a home. A shopper is not selecting a clever campaign. The shopper is considering debt, distance, space, neighbors, and an imagined future. Duderstadt’s approach begins by respecting the weight of that decision. It uses the clean listing, the useful photograph, the plain translation, and then the story that makes the information memorable.
At WillDuder.com, he now writes as an “introverted marketer skeptical of shortcuts.” The essays wander through language, leadership, trivia, gardening, and the ordinary textures that never fit neatly inside a dashboard. In August 2026, he published a short note on helping tell M/I Homes’ 50-year story. Hundreds of lines, he wrote, were composed and cut for 90 seconds of finished work. It is an apt miniature of his career: gather widely, edit hard, keep the facts straight, and leave the audience with something it can feel.
The work is not a contest between data and emotion. It is a relay. One carries truth to the point where the other can make it matter. Duderstadt has spent his career learning the handoff.