Feb 6, 2009
Multi-layer Brand & Social Media
Last week, I had an opportunity to attend an extraordinary meeting with some of the most senior people at NAR, on the topic of social media. I have to thank Jim Duncan for putting the meeting together, and of course, I am grateful to the leadership at NAR for being willing to listen to a bunch of blogger types. I finally got the chance to meet Jim in person, and it was absolutely fantastic to meet and converse about social media, web, real estate, and marketing with some of the best and brightest in our industry.
Quick shout-outs then to: Dale Stinton, Frank Sibley, Mark Lesswing, Pamela Kabati, Hilary Marsh, and Keith Garner from NAR. And to my fellow realestistas Jim Duncan, Ben Martin, Jay Thompson, Joe Ferrara, Eric Bryn, and via telephone, the redoubtable Benn Rosales, a tip of the ole hat.
However, this is not a post about that meeting. It is, rather, about a concept that was brought up that has really intrigued me: multi-layer brand, and how that interacts with social media.
Multi-Layer Branding
The notion is that all working realtors (or REALTORS, more precisely) have what one might call a “multi-layer brand” and that this will have enormous impact on social media (indeed, on all marketing efforts) for real estate services.
Let me illustrate:
Multi-Layer Branding, Badly Illustrated
So the idea here is that every single REALTOR has multiple brands.
First, they are a REALTOR, a member of the National Association of REALTORS. Presumably, this distinguishes them from the non-REALTORS, who I understand are referred to as “licensees”. Those non-REALTORS are nonetheless real estate brokers and agents, fully licensed to help people transact business.
Then they are often members of large franchises or networks, such as Coldwell Banker. Again, this distinguishes them from people who are not CB agents and do not carry the CB brand.
Then you have brokerages — in our industry, many/most operate under their own brand name as an extension of the franchise brand. (Those that are not franchised operate under their own brand.) So presumably, being with Coldwell Banker United is different from being with Coldwell Banker Joe-Blow Realty.
Next tier down may be either Teams or Offices. Now this brand is trying to distinguish the realtor from others who are not part of the “Jill Smith Team”. It’s trying to say, “Sure, those people are also CB United REALTORS, but we’re better/different because we are the Jill Smith Team.”
And finally, you have the agent’s personal brand: “That Joan Cartwright is a real expert, and so friendly too!”
As the graphic attempts to illustrate, brand awareness (or breadth of brand) is higher towards the top and drops as you go down the layers. More consumers have heard of REALTOR than have heard of Jill Smith Team. Conversely, and interestingly, brand value (or power) is lower towards the top and higher towards the bottom. For example, you may be referred business because you’re Joan Cartwright, super-agent, but only rarely (if ever) will you have a consumer say, “I’m giving you this listing, because you’re with Coldwell Banker, instead of those Keller Williams people.”
Hey, I got another follower on Twitter!
Born of Marketing, Growing Up on Social Media?
What I find interesting about this is that the multi-layer brand is the inevitable result of past marketing strategies focused around mass communications media.
It is much easier — and more effective — for national organizations to leverage TV, radio, and national print campaigns to create a national brand than it is for a local agent team to do so. In fact, it probably makes no sense for Jill Smith Team to buy a Superbowl ad, but it may very well make a lot of sense for NAR to do so.
Since traditional marketing had a more-or-less direct correlation to the amount of spend, awareness is inevitably tied to size. At the same time, over the past decade or so, the erosion of brand value not just for real estate brands but for almost all brands has been accelerating as consumers become more and more networked, and more and more skeptical of advertising. As the Wired article says:
A study by retail-industry tracking firm NPD Group found that nearly half of those who described themselves as highly loyal to a brand were no longer loyal a year later. Even seemingly strong names rarely translate into much power at the cash register. Another remarkable study found that just 4 percent of consumers would be willing to stick with a brand if its competitors offered better value for the same price.
And,
The single biggest explanation for fragile brands is the swelling strength of the consumer. We’ve seen a pronounced jump in the amount of information available about goods and services. It’s not just bellwethers like Consumers Union and J.D. Power, established authorities that unquestionably shape people’s buying decisions, but also the crush of magazines, Web sites, and message boards scrutinizing products.
Hinted at in the Wired article is the growing power of “social media”. New-school web-heads might look at “message boards” and laugh at it as being so Web 1.0. But Facebook is really just a message board, which are in turn just a prettier face to the old Usenet newsgroups. Plus ςa change…
One of the observations I made about social media at the meeting is that no matter what else social media might do, it definitely does one thing: bypass traditional media. Brands that were born from traditional media, and sustained by traditional media plays (like mass advertising and PR) need to look at social media with some care and even trepidation. Because social media allows other players to bypass traditional media, one of the implications is that the higher-awareness brands (whose value is already weak) start losing awareness to boot. If you’re a consumer getting most of your information from Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, you may never have even heard of Keller Williams as a brand. You’re certainly not going to have any impression or emotional connection to the KW brand.
The Challenge
The conundrum of the higher-awareness brand owners then, such as NAR, is what to do about social media. There are three available strategies:
- Alienate
- Ignore
- Embrace
Alienate
An organization (such as NAR) can try to alienate social media. It can prohibit its members from blogging, from using Twitter to talk about the organization, and the like. It can leverage its power in traditional media to denigrate these “upstart know-nothing bloggers”. Traditional news organizations have tried taking this tack in the past, with disastrous results.
For real estate, at this stage of the game, I believe that trying to alienate and denigrate social media would just make an organization look out of touch and stuck in the past.
Suffice to say, alienating social media is not recommended as a strategy.
Ignore
You can try to pretend that social media doesn’t really exist, or if it does, it’s not something to be taken all that seriously. While not prohibiting involvement, you can choose not to promote involvement either. Have a website, even a blog, but don’t expend a lot of effort beyond that.
A variation on the theme is to do social media as a ghettoized niche of marketing. Far too many companies that have “social media” also have “corporate communications” and “public relations” and so on. Only those people who work in “social media” are allowed to be the voice of the organization, and blog posts have to be approved by the Director of Social Media or some such.
The trouble with this is that “social media” is just a channel; that isn’t really important. What is important is the attitude that makes “social media” work — the natural, authentic, human voice. When you have segregated social media into a small corner of the overall marketing effort, then what you are really trying to do is ignore it, hoping it’s a fad that will go away.
Depending on the organization, this very well may be the ideal strategy. If you’re Apple, for instance, I don’t know that it pays for you to let your people blog freely or twitter away. So much of Apple’s brand image, and therefore its power, is a creature of traditional media that is tightly controlled by some very talented marketing people. Why mess with it? Sure, have a blog; but make sure it’s controlled. Have an Apple Facebook page, but make sure that it’s tightly controlled. If traditional methods are working, then why mess with it?
Embrace
The final strategy is to really embrace social media as an organization. The challenge here is that social media at its heart is not a tactic, but a culture. It means adopting Cluetrain principles of lowering barriers to communication between the people within your walls to consumers, interest groups, and stakeholders outside of those walls.
Social media isn’t just a corner of marketing; it becomes marketing. Corporate communications & PR are subsumed into the social media culture of openness and authenticity. There ain’t nothing to spin, if your culture is about openness and honesty, is there? Everyone from the CEO down to the janitor become voices of the organization, for good and bad. There is no “funnel” of engagement into the organization, anymore than there is a “megaphone” of the Corporate Voice out to the public.
Understandably, this state of affairs would make most marketers and most corporate executives extremely nervous.
Let me see that detailed marketing plan for a second...
Enter Chaos
As if wholesale organizational cultural change were not nerve-wracking enough, now we add multi-layer brand effects to the mix.
If a higher-order (in terms of awareness) organization starts to engage in social media — meaning, relaxing the barriers between its people and the public — what impact does that have on downstream brands?
So for example, say Coldwell Banker really embraces social media. All of a sudden, you have corporate executives from CB national blogging openly and freely about real estate, about brokerage, about what’s going on inside 1 Campus, and so on. They’re providing a lot of direct interaction with consumers, agents, and whatnot. They start going on Twitter and engaging with individual agents of CB, even individual consumers.
While this may be wonderful, there will be a sort of a “flattening effect” that takes place. The national Coldwell Banker brand starts to be defined by the open conversation that takes place directly with consumers and with agents.
So if you are the director of marketing for CB United, what does that do to you and your plans for the CB United brand which you are trying to differentiate from other CB-branded companies?
What if you’re Jill Smith, and you’re trying really hard to enforce a certain way of doing business in an effort to differentiate yourself from the rest of the CB agents out there? What if your strategy was to use social media to convey to your clients that you “get it”, that you’re “authentic”, not like those other CB agents? And here comes CB corporate essentially granting that brand image of authenticity to all CB agents by virtue of their social media efforts.
While this impact of top-level brand on lower-level brand has always been in place for any multi-layer brand, social media exacerbates the problem because of its global reach, combined with direct interaction. Jill Smith Team can overpower traditional media in its local market by focusing the ad spend in local channels, and public relations strategies focusing on local publications. But with social media, it takes the same (low) effort for the local consumer/agent to follow @jillsmithteam on Twitter as it does to follow @coldwellbanker.
And Coldwell Banker’s blog is likely to have far higher SERPS on various search engines, and have huge multiples of readers/subscribers than Jill Smith Team’s blog.
Now what?
Many Questions, No Answers
One of the reasons why I wrote this is that I have no answers. It’s a new area, a new conundrum. The amount of spend — higher but broader at the top, lower but more concentrated at the lower end — has little impact on social media. Conversely, those lower-down on the pyramid can get completely swamped and silenced by those higher up.
I’m sure there’s a way out of this maze, and that we’ll all figure it out together. But right now, there are far more questions than there are answers.
I have a feeling that the solution will involve something like a cascade of value via cascade of content, with a coordinated — rather than a commanded — social media effort from the top-down, bottom-up, and in-between. The solution might involve one or more of the layers simply atrophying away to meaninglessness as openness becomes the norm, rather than the exception.
We’ll be returning to this topic in the future. In the meantime, what are your thoughts?
-rsh
More from Notorious-Rob
I wonder if this conundrum is much to do about nothing. Most of the over brands are not thinking about SM as a tactic. The ones that are thinking about it are essentially doing so in a confused manner – kind of like a caveman staring at butane lighter. Most though, like the caveman with the lighter, are frightened by it. Of the few over brands that approach SM, most will either screw it up or speak to a deaf audience. The consumer has not bought into the big brands and the big brands have done little to buy into the consumer. I cite the NAR Ethic campaign or the Now is the Right Time to Buy campaign that has had no effect on anyone.
The bottom line is, the agent is still in charge. If those over the agent attempt to hamstring an agent, the agent can either change over brands or start their own.
As I said in my original comment, “I see the brand as an enabler for its brokers and agents to succeed in their social media efforts.”
The excessive bashing of the “overbrands” strikes me as self-serving commentary by marginalized competitors and doesn’t advance the discussion of social media and its applications for real estate marketing by NAR, the major brands or other industry players.
As with most innovation, much progress is made by individual players and then enhanced by organizations with a proven track record of success and a solid foundation from which to build.
In regard to all of the comments concerning the value that major brands provide to their brokers and agents… top tier training and education, enormous SEM and SEO spend, plus a powerful worldwide referral network of real estate professionals all designed to drive more business through the System highlight just a few of the benefits.
I would like to see some relevant statistics on how much business is actually being driven by social media. While I understand the principles of cluetrain and I believe social media is a great new channel for network development and CRM, much work remains to enhance its utilization in driving qualfied leads and converting units.
Now, about Rob’s question, “Where does the C21 brand fit in as a differentiator from other brands, whether independents (see, e.g., Leading RE companies) or other franchises?”
The great differentiator…
Ah, the latest jargon among the realestistas, (love tha term by the way. I feel so Che, when I read it.)
Your question really drives at various points among the other posts here…what does brand mean now that everyone is their own brand. I asked this question of Scoble recently, “Are we moving to a place where every business must become their own media company?” Will Anthony’s Bakery be required to make news and entertaining content to thrive in a Web 2.0 world?
I doubt it. CENTURY 21 is is 64 countries around the world with a network of over 130,000 professionals. Regardless of whether or not agents create individualized brands within the companies and the “overbrand” is irrelevant. Brand awareness for C21 is 97% and brand preference is 60%. If you polled 100 people and asked them to name a real estate company, I’m guessing a majority would say CENTURY 21.
Now, I don’t want to play the Family Fued card, but to suggest that the major RE brands are not already developing a cogent strategy for leveraging social media to its highest and best use is either foolhardy or wishful thinking.
I look forward to more spirited debate on this subject.
Best Regards,
Matt Gentile
C21 may have a network of 130,000 agents. Not sure I would causally refer to all of them as professionals since that term certainly connotes some brand value not everyone has earned.
Rob, the challenge you outline is endemic to many brands today who’ve relied in the past on a command and control, top down models of marketing and advertising. And some brands are just too ubiquitous to elicit passion that would align with a social media branding campaign.
One interesting point you allude to is the “disintermediation” effect that a big brand’s social media strategy could have on its agent constituency (i.e., the “Jill scenario”); it’s like a top-down Coup d’état on the agent brand, which would have the effect of splintering their agent community from a loyalty perspective as well as diluting their customer loyalty (who often align with the agent over the big brand).
In response to your query: “I’m asking what happens when these strategies are successful”, that success will be hard to come by because it necessarily assumes a command and control, top down orchestration, which is inherently inapposite to the grassroots nature and power of social media. Thus, your scenario turns on what is the definition of “success”.
I also wholeheartedly agree with Jim Duncan’s comment: “If the strategy focuses on the technology and process and neglects the people, it will fail”, which aligns well with “If anything, I see the brand as an enabler for its brokers and agents to succeed in their social media efforts”, with my caveat that this enabling effect has the potential echo effect of further diluting and fragmenting the big brand’s overarching relationship with consumers (i.e., big brand enables local franchisee to tap social media power which propels franchisee agent to “touch” local consumer, thus, establishing a deeper 1-to-1 relationship with customer which is in tension with big brand’s enterprise level customer for life goals).
>“Are we moving to a place where every business must become their own media company?” Will Anthony’s Bakery be required to make news and entertaining content to thrive in a Web 2.0 world?
I love that.
That thinking allows Ines to create Miamism as a brand, Kelley Koehler to create Housechick as a brand, and me to create The Brick Ranch as a brand. All with real value targeted at a very focused group of people. Not worldwide- that’s not our focus. We’ll leave that to you.
I also love that you think Web 2.0 is “news and entertaining content”. That just rocks my world. Don’t ever change.
Teri,
Obviously “news and entertainment” were not meant to define Web 2.0, but to demonstrate a point with regard to how businesses are leveraging it to create media properties (e.g., http://tv.winelibrary.com).
Thank you for the belittling sarcasm though, great to get the heart pumping in the morning.
You don’t ever change either.
Regards,
Matt Gentile
(SCMR – Same as it Ever Was)
I think I’m in love with this discussion. I might propose marriage to it.
@Eric -
I think you’re right on that an overbrand SM strategy cannot be traditional ‘command&control’. And that Jim’s insight re: people, not technology is an important one.
I’m looking at some ideas and concepts right now that might propose a solution to the conundrum, but that’s a big project.
It’ll take me a while to sort that one out.
So what’s LeadingRE’s SM strategy — I’m thinking the new blog would be a great place to expound your thoughts on the subject. (hint, hint)
@Matt -
As is fairly obvious by now, I’m in the Robnecks camp of “Big Brands are meaningful”
But I think you do have to acknowledge that despite 97% brand awareness, that 60% brand preference number is highly suspect.
Do you have any studies or data to show (perhaps from polling your own agents) that consumers choose to list with a C21 agent over a CB agent or a RE/MAX agent because of the brand? Just speaking for myself, unless I’m in the ultra-luxury market where Sotheby’s or Corcoran or some such might be meaningful, I don’t know that the brand of the listing broker means a thing to me.
The same goes for buy-side; one study I read showed that some huge majority (80+%?) of consumers work with the first agent to call them back. Hardly a recommendation for brand value.
This is the basic issue that Marc Davison points out all the time, and I think is accurately reflected in the Multi-Layer pyramid: brand awareness is inversely correlated to brand value.
Now I happen to love the confirmation that you provide that every major RE brand is launching or seriously planning a Social Media strategy. Of course you are; knowing some of the bright minds at 1 Campus, I have no doubts on it. I mean, this post was inspired by a meeting that NAR — the so-called stodgy, doesn’t-get-it, NAR — held to understand social media strategy more. I know that’s happening.
So the real questions, I think, are:
(1) Will Big Brands gain brand value commensurate with brand awareness through social media or not?
(2) If gain, then will that gain by the over-brands come necessarily at the expense of the under-brands, or is there a strategy by which everyone benefits?
(3) What would such a strategy look like?
As an aside, the debate between you and Teri is awesome.
And it points to the tensions that will need to be resolved as every overbrand pursues SM strategies.
-rsh
Matt-
Sarcastic, yes. It’s a gift.
Belittling? No. There will always be ways for me to provide more value in my own backyard, using sm, and also create a brand for myself, in my own backyard, than C21, or Trulia or R.com for that matter, ever will.
Conversely, however, you can create a worldwide awareness of a brand, and there’s where you focus lies. My view is ground level, “marginalized” as you say. I’ll take that, and build the best damn marginalized brand I can, by offering each individual client the best damn service I’m capable of. You can’t do that. And my saying that, even sarcastically, is not meant to belittle, but to point out the fundamental differences in focus.
Rob-
> I don’t know that the brand of the listing broker means a thing to me.
>The same goes for buy-side; one study I read showed that some huge majority (80+%?) of consumers work with the first agent to call them back. Hardly a recommendation for brand value.
Exactly.
Rob,
Here is a link to the Millward-Brown survey data that was posted by our good friend on the West Coast as soon as it was released: http://waves.wavgroup.com/century-21-is-rated-highest-real-estate-brand-by-consumers-for-9th-straight-year
The study was conducted by a third party, Millward-Brown, a global market research organization. C’mon, I might be a flack, but I wouldn’t push information into the blogosphere without appropriate backup.
To Teri’s point, I agree that the business is won on the ground. We can only support the environment in an effort to create a competitive advantage for our Brokers and Agents, via training, marketing, advertising and business consulting.
The brand of a listing broker may not mean a thing to you, but it does to 60% of the Millward-Brown survey respondents.
Rob your questions are spot on and only time will tell. It is an exciting time to be in real estate marketing at any level.
Keep up the great work. I’ll be watching.
Best Regards,
Matt Gentile
(SCMR) Same as it Ever Was
Hey Matt -
I saw that study by Millwar-Brown
And those are some impressive brand awareness/preference numbers.
That isn’t what I questioned, though. (Nor, do I think you’re a ‘flack’ for whatever that’s worth, heh.)
What I’m questioning is whether the 60% “preference” number actually translates to action when the rubber meets the road. If it does, then you guys should have at least anecdotal evidence from your agents — collect enough of those and you’ve got real evidence of something.
Send out a questionnaire to your 130,000 agents and ask them, “Tell us about a recent deal in which the consumer said he/she chose you over others because of the C21 brand.”
The 60% preference number simply reflects consumers saying that they would. But what’s that saying in RE? Buyers are liars?
FWIW, and I guess I can only speak to my own motivations while at Realogy, in response to what you said about supporting the Brokers and Agents… I know that a huge part of MY motivation for working as hard as I did at CBC was that I really respected our affiliates. Really. These are men and women who have sacrificed so much, struggled through decades of hardships building a successful business, with ups and downs and war stories aplenty. I always felt a sense of responsibility to them to help them be more successful because of their association with CBC.
I rather suspect that quite a few people working at Big Franchise feel the same way. Whether they’re effective or not is a separate question; their motivation, however, is really to help the affiliates. That much, I can attest to.
-rsh
I realized I was logged in under the wrong alias when I posted that last comment. I hope you can delete it and use this one instead:
I take exception to your illustration-the point of the pyramid should be at the top, pointing to the consumer, with the rest of the layers providing the foundation to the agent who is the ultimate point of contact with the consumer.
As Jim said, each layer has to consider who its customer is….every one, except for the agent, needs to consider the layer above it(or below in your illustration), even more-so than it should consider the consumer in its social media efforts.
NAR for example, needs to nail down it’s value proposition to those it serves even more than it needs to prove anything to consumers. The same goes for the franchise, the company and the team. Ultimately, no one can offer the consumer value or prove our worth to the public better or more easily than the agent in the field. So, the supporting layers need to offer value and support to the next layer to allow the ultimate goal of meeting consumer needs to happen. As you said, doing that without interfering with the next layer’s efforts is the art of it.
Being a few months in to joining a Better Homes and Gardens franchise, I am pleased at how this particular Brand has integrated social media in to their plan…offering all the tools and support it can to help the affiliates navigate the new world of real estate while being very aware of its role to the franchisee.
More tricky is defining the role of the franchisee, which struggles to balance the needs of the older mindset of agent that expects the company to generate leads, etc, to the new, self-supporting agent of the future…the path of the social media ‘sell’ to the folks on the ground is rocky, in our area at least.
But now I’m starting to ramble and probably thinking too much of my own particular little world here. Thanks for bringing this conversation up, I’ve been thinking about this in my own confused way and you have helped to organize my mind a bit
The study from C21 reveals a particular anomaly about real estate and how it values or understands the concept of branding.
While the study cites C21 as the most well known brand, I will argue that it’s the most well know name in real estate. But being a well known name does not make a brand. A brand is something different. Its backed by specific promises it keeps, trusts it forms that creates an identity that distinguishes it from others.
I would argue that C21 has not built that cache of brand value in the consumer world, it has hardly done it inside real estate.
But I do agree its the most recognized name in real estate. But ask any of the respondents of that survey to tell you what makes C21 different from ERA or Remax or anything and they would be hard pressed.
Marc-
>But being a well known name does not make a brand. A brand is something different. Its backed by specific promises it keeps, trusts it forms that creates an identity that distinguishes it from others.
Thank you for saying that so well.
@Lisa -
I deleted your first comment, as per your request.
I think you raise some really interesting challenges.
One of the big issues this raises is the fact that except for the franchisor, pretty much everyone else in the brand-layer-cake has the Agent as the consumer. And we can now add web-based brands such as Redfin and BlueRoof to the mix.
But unless NAR goes totally silent, it has no choice but to impact its members via the public. It’s such a visible entity, and is in the news, and so on, that any missteps by NAR will reflect on all realtors (capital R or no). Same with any appropriately large entity, like Realogy or RE/MAX.
I suppose a question would be to someone like you, Lisa:
What would YOU want from each of the overbrands above you?
And how much are you willing to pay to each of them for whatever it is that you want from them?
-rsh