Notorious R.O.B.

He thinks real estate brokers should start local newspapers:

What should not-so-busy real estate brokers do?

Why not start a local newspaper?

Here’s how I would do it. Assume you’ve got six people in your office. Each person is responsible to do two things each day:

• Interview a local business, a local student or a local political activist. You can do it by phone, it can be very short and it might take you ten minutes.
• Get 20 households to ‘subscribe’ by giving you their email address and asking for a free subscription. You can use direct contact or flyers or speeches to get your list.

Twice a week, send out the ‘newspaper’ by email.

Of course, quite a few local realtors are already doing this, so this is one case in which realtors > Seth Godin.

The other problem with Seth’s idea is that unlike newspapers, a realtor has some definite issues with transparency.  For example, politics.

You can’t call yourself a local newspaper of any quality if you’re not providing information and news about the going-on’s inside governmental units.  Whether it’s the zoning board and its decisions, or some bribery scandal at City Hall, or an alderman’s take on property taxes, I expect a journalist to uncover things that folks might not want uncovered.  I expect journalist-types to rail against problems and highlight issues.

How do you do that, while making your living from selling homes in the area that you’ve just called “the hive of crime in Essex county”?  Will your sellers be thrilled with your expose on corruption in your county when you’re trying to convince buyers to spend hundreds of thousands on their house?

And if you don’t call things the way they really are, then what kind of newspaper are you?  If you never criticize, never talk about negative things, never talk about what’s bad about your town/area, then you’re not a newspaper; you’re propaganda.

Less Market, More Community

Realtors, however, could and should listen to Seth as to the core concept:

Local newspaper is about the local community, not the local market.

I touched on this on this post on the Onblog, but I’ve since had the opportunity to evolve my thinking a bit.

I believe that one concrete change most local realtor blogs (and attendant newsletters and such) can make is to shift the focus from blogging about the local market to blogging about the local community.  Rather than thinking of your audience as potential buyers/sellers, think of your audience as existing and future homeowners.

Far too many realtor blogs have only “Local Market Conditions for Town XYZ” as the only substantive post for weeks on end.  That tells me pretty clearly that all you’re interested in doing is telling me about the price of housing in the hopes of getting me to buy/sell.  Peppering articles/posts about “How to Sell Your Home in 90-days” or “Staging for Success” isn’t giving me any reason to read your stuff if I’m not in the market.

Instead, give me information that I might care about as a resident in your town/neighborhood.  Tell me about the water main break on Main St., so I know to go around it on my way home.  Tell me about the new town ordinance against dogwalking being discussed.  Tell me about the new Home Depot moving into the next town over, since that might impact my favorite local hardware store.  Tell me about the new restaurant that’s opening next week.

And so on.

I am far more likely to follow you, read your blog, and sign up for your newsletter.

Would that compete with true local media operations, like a Baristanet?  Probably not.  But do you need to compete with local media?  Probably not.

-rsh

Once in a while, Seth Godin will write something that makes me remember that the dude is really pretty smart.  This is one of those things.

Faced with the excitement of making a CD and all the knobs and dials, they overproduced the record. They went from being two real guys playing authentic music, live and for free, and became a multi-tracked quartet in search of a professional sound. And they ended up in the dead zone. Not enough gloss to be slick, too much to be real.

This happens at restaurants all the time. Give me a handmade huarache and it’s fine if it’s on a paper plate. Or give me something from Thomas Keller. But I have no patience for the stuff in the dead zone, the items that are too slick to be real, but not slick enough to be a marvel. Who, exactly, wants an industrial tuna sandwich wrapped in plastic wrap?

You can send me a hand-written note (but don’t write it in crayon with words spelled wrong) and I’ll read it. And you can send me a beautifully typeset Fedex package. But if you send me mass-produced junk with a dot matrix printer, out it goes. The dead zone again.

This insight has one of those head-smacking D’oh!’s built into it that makes what is profound seem incredibly simplistic.  But it is profound.

In our advertising saturated world, going halfway pretty much guarantees your marketing is going to get ignored.

In particular, I think this bears quite a lot of thinking about in real estate.

Marketing a house for sale cannot possibly be an easy job.  No way, no how.  Especially in this market.  At the same time, I do think that far too many brokers fall straight into Godin’s Dead Zone when it comes to marketing materials for the homes they are representing.  They are too slick to be real, but not slick enough to be a marvel.

I did a Google search and picked this flyer entirely at random:

Holy Dead Zone, Batman!

The flyer is too slick to be “real”.  And yet, it’s not slick enough to be eye-catching or attention-grabbing.  There’s no wow there.  No pizzazz.  Nothing that makes you want to check it out further.  (Granted, it’s a hard thing to judge printed material by online photos… but still….)

Note that this particular listing is for a $10m house — that’s ten million dollars.  Assuming a modest 2.5% commission rate, that means the listing agent stands to receive a $250,000 payday if the property is sold.  A quarter of a million dollars.

And this is the best he can do?

I’m not entirely sure what a “non-slick, genuine, real” marketing flyer might be for this.  Maybe a variation on this:

House For Sale! $10M and its yours!

Granted, the client might be nonplussed if you were to do a set of hand-drawn posters for his $10M alpine palace, but hey, it would probably get people to read further.  It might even get some buzz going, because of its uniqueness.

A step up might be to do a bunch of handwritten cards on beautiful stationery and enclose a personally shot photo (not a professional job) with it inviting the recipient to inquire further about this amazing property.

If you’re not going that way, then you have to go all-out, and be so slick that the materials become noteworthy.  You have to impress the person seeing the marketing materials with the professionalism, the thought, and the production values.  Something more like this:

Why yes, I wear coats to the beach....

In fact, Corcoran routinely does some very nice things.  Take a look at this for example.  If you’re going to represent $10M properties on the web, something like that is slick enough to be a marvel.  It grabs hold of your attention, invites you to play with the cool Flash toys, and makes you marvel at the beautiful homes.  It’s like very high quality housing porn.

The lesson doesn’t apply, I think, only to the super-high end either.  Every house is still going to be some family’s biggest purchase.  It’s likely to be the seller’s biggest sale as well — a key event in that family’s life.  Don’t you owe it to the client to do more than slap together some hasty templated flyer that lands smack dab in the middle of the dead zone, neither authentic nor professional?

It is my considered opinion that quite a few real estate professionals would benefit from a regular diet of design books, magazines, and websites.  I particularly like The Dieline — a package design blog that is regularly updated, and filled with some of the most striking designs I’ve seen.  And no, none of the designs are of real estate flyers, but ideas could translate.  The usage of color can translate.  The thoughtful design can translate.

Whether you pursue the simple elegance of simplicity that forsakes commercialized slickness in favor of authentic human voice, or the blow-your-mind power of truly slick, marvelous designed materials, Godin’s insight is really worth some serious thought.  Stay out of the dead zone.

-rsh

Seth Godin has one of his signature short posts that provoke a lot of thought on the three levers of marketing.  He believes that the three levers are Fear, Hope, and Love:

The TSA is in the fear business. Every time they get you take off your shoes, they’re using fear (of the unknown or perhaps of missing your plane) to get you take action.

Chanel is in the hope business. How else to get you to spend $5,000 a gallon for perfume?

Hope can be something as trivial as convenience. I hope that this smaller size of yogurt will save me time or get a smile out of my teenager…

And love? Love gets you to support a candidate even when he screws up or changes his mind on a position or disagrees with you on another one. Love incites you to protest when they change the formula for Coke, or to cry out in delight when you see someone at the market wearing a Google t-shirt.

I generally agree, except that I go by what my Contracts professor said was the motivating factor behind every business transaction: Fear and Greed.  I’ve since refined that thought with my theory of the 7DS approach to marketing.

The problematic lever, therefore, is Love.

As Seth looks at it, love motivates people to support a candidate even when he screws up.  Or motivates people to protest New Coke, or be delighted at a Google t-shirt.

All of these are problematic, however.

First, do people support a candidate out of love even if he advocates policies they can’t stand?  Would all of the Obama lovers (since Seth claims people respect Hillary, but love Obama) remain supporters if he suddenly became ardently pro-life or anti-union?  I don’t think so.  In contrast, many conservative Republicans are supporting McCain, despite the fact that most of them despise the man, because they fear the Democrats more than they despise McCain.

Second, is the protest of New Coke out of love for the old Coke, or is it simply human psychology whipped up by mass media at work here?  Humans generally dislike change: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is a common perspective.  Because the issue at hand was so unimportant (the taste of a soft drink), I wonder if it wasn’t just resistance to change at work there.  And resistance to change, incidentally, is rooted in Fear.

Third, do people actually love Google?  Or do they just hate Microsoft?

And really, what is problematic is that as a marketer, you can work with fear and greed (or hope, if you’re so inclined to use that term instead).  But you just can’t work with love.

Seth’s idea seems to be that companies that love their customers receive love in return.  Does Google love its customers?  Of course not.  I’ve never had my lower bid for keywords accepted because Google loves me.  And love, at its essence, is sacrificial.  Since companies are not in business for self-sacrifice, at least not for long, they can’t love their “customers” enough to have that love reciprocated.

Besides, how would a company even going about implementing the “love” campaign anyhow?

I think Seth recognizes that, as he describes the love approach as being the most difficult/problematic.  But his recommendation is to sell hope and move towards love.

Way I see it, that’s a confusion in terminology.  People do not love companies; at best, they like companies.  And they like companies that consistently meet or exceed their expectations.  But that isn’t love.  They’re not likely to pay you more than what you asked for out of love.  They’re not going to sacrifice themselves for your benefit — believing that is a pretty rapid road to insolvency.  They are, however, likely to end up trusting the company that consistently delivers results, whether those results are higher returns on mutual funds, consistently good taste in soft drinks, or in leads delivered to their websites.

I would refine the recommendation to, “sell greed, and move towards trust”.

Maybe that just makes me cynical.

-rsh