To the extent that incumbent market leaders rest on their laurels, do not stay focused or do not keep up with technology, market leadership is up for grabs for any luxury real estate marketing professional with a superior value proposition and the right brand strategy. Market leaders beware! With the right brand strategy the tables can be turned on you in one year or less, seemingly, overnight.
What a difference one year can make! Take a look at what happened to the previous market leader, Nokia, in the smart phone market category. They slipped from #1 to #3. According to market research firm Strategy Analytics:
- Apple's market share rose to 18.5% in the second quarter from 13.5% a year earlier
- Samsung's smartphone market share jumped to 17.5% from 5.0%
- Nokia slipped to 15.2% from 38.1% a year earlier.
To surpass Apple going forward, Strategy Analytics says #2 Samsung will need a three-fold strategy to:
- Boost its retail presence for smart phones in countries such as the U.S., China, Japan and the U.K
- Continuously upgrade its phones based on Google Inc's Android software, as well as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows platform and its own Bada operating system
- Develop advanced cloud-based services
That is going to take some doing. Apple, by far, has the best customer service experience in just about any retail category. Recently, we discovered that we could not access the internet via our home WiFi on our iPad; yet we were able to connect with our laptop (PC) computer. We took the iPad into our local Apple store and encountered superlative service. They reinstalled and updated our software on the spot, free of charge, and it was fixed within minutes.
How can Samsung beat that? The idea of having this level of LOCAL service and product education for ALL of our mobile devices and computers in one place is a value proposition that simply cannot be rivaled. Apple is in the process of rolling out 24 large new stores in China, alone.
As a busy husband and wife team, who travels extensively, saving time is essential and so is the ease of sharing digital information and media. Learning to use one brand of software/hardware is much more efficient than learning to use multiple brands. Being able to instantly sync all of our data, apps and media between all devices and computers, plus having everything readily accessible online in the cloud, 24/7 (coming this fall from Apple), is an offering that Samsung or Nokia will be very hard-pressed to match.
Other brands may have some outstanding or even better product features. But, for us, Apple’s unique selling proposition is inimitable. As the challenger to the market leader (which Apple was until it became the leader) you must be able to articulate your superior value proposition in a nano-second. Here is how this plays out with Apple in just 7 words (our words):
Local Service + Total Product Integration +Wireless Synchronization
In luxury real estate marketing, when you can distill and express your distinct, extraordinary promise of value in just a few words, and those words are remarkable, people will voluntarily spread those words for you (like we just gladly did for Apple), That is how you can quickly turn the tables on the incumbent market leader in your marketplace, catching them off-guard.
See Part 2 of This Blog Series
- WATCH VIDEOS-
Buzz-Worthy Luxury Real Estate Websites
Personal Branding Case Studies Company Branding Case Studies
- JOIN THE LOL COMMUNTIY -
GET FLUENT. GET AFFLUENT!
Linked In, Facebook, Active Rain
Follow Us on Twitter: LuxuryMarketing