Luxury Real Estate Branding: Is Your Message on Target?

Expression of Joy?

 Luxury real estate marketing professionals take heed!  A very valuable lesson in messaging, can be learned from the massive new ad campaign of luxury brand, BMW.  Messaging is the words you select to communicate the essence of your brand to your target market.  A brand’s message tells your audience how you or your company wants to be perceived as distinct from your closest competition. As such messaging is an extremely important component of personal and company branding.

BMW has set out to “own” a word in the mind of affluent consumers. They have staked a claim to the word “joy” and they are spending big bucks to get it to stick in your mind.  We do not believe that it will stick. Whereas, they have owned the phrase, “the ultimate driving machine” for years, BMW is completely missing their target this time. They are now off their previously strong brand signal which stood for efficiency, high-performance, and precision engineering.

Do you know of an agent or a company in your marketplace or a neighboring marketplace that “owns” a segment of the market? Perhaps, it is a specific golf community, a luxury high rise, the downtown area or the waterfront area.  Their name is synonymous with that niche.

You can own a niche or a category of product or service. But, you cannot own an emotion! eBay owns the word “auctions” on the internet. The only place where they do not have a monopoly is in Japan where Yahoo! owns “auctions”. eBay actually bowed out of Japan and ceded to Yahoo!   

When someone wins an auction on eBay or Yahoo! they may experience the emotion of joy. But, neither can claim the emotion as a brand differentiator. When new homeownersa close escrow on their first home can one agent claim ownership of this emotion as a means of being distinct?

Could a teenager derive more joy from purchasing her first car than a third time BMW owner?  Joy transcends demographics which is another reason why it cannot be owned as just a luxury word. Besides, do Mercedes or Lexus owners not experience joy?

The “expression of joy” depicted above is an actual canvas the size of a basketball court, a BMW publicity stunt, created by a driver “joyfully” driving on the canvas with various colors of paint. Could a joyful Acura driver not compose such a canvas?

If you want your luxury real estate personal or company brand to stand for something, make sure it is something that your competition cannot also stand for or own. Then, get your messaging on target. Otherwise, you will defeat the entire purpose of branding: “Top of Mind” in a specific category or niche.

Perhaps, a better new word for BMW to own would be "Vision".  Check out this cool BMW concept car on VIDEO! (Click on the center of the video player).

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2010: The Year to Unleash the Tiger within You

2010 is the year of the tiger. According to the Chinese horoscope, drama, intensity, far reaching changes, and massive technological advances are in store for all of us. Seizing opportunities and maximizing your personal, individual talents is advised. We believe that 2010 heralds an era when personal branding and micro-niche marketing for luxury real estate marketing professionals is no longer an option.  It is an imperative!  2010 is the year to unleash the tiger within you and embrace the unabashed pursuit of market leadership.

The internet has empowered consumers with self-service capabilities which enable them to ferret out most of the real estate information they need.  Who will fill in the gaps and effectively interpret that information-you or your competition?  When they are ready to reach for purchasing help or are ready to interview a listing agent, who will be the first to come to mind? That is the question!

Most time-starved and attention deficient consumers can only hold one, two or three brands in their minds in any given category of product or service.  The unabashed pursuit of market leadership means seizing the #1 position in the consumers mind. Coke outsells #2, Pepsi 2:1.  #3, RC Cola, is barely on the radar screen and all others colas are settling for the crumbs. 

The internet has also empowered professionals like you to potentially become “one-man or one-woman brands”, local celebrities, TV stars, radio talk show hosts and journalists.  Those luxury real estate agents who are willing to get over their fear of technology and make the time to get up to speed with this stupendous opportunity will be the big winners in 2010 and beyond.

Each micro-niche, within your marketplace, represents an opportunity to become a leading expert, the personal brand of choice and the market leader.  It could be a specific golf community or a single high-rise luxury condo.  The idea is to find an uncontested market niche that you can “own” and dominate, and serve better than anyone else. But, the key is to be passionate about whatever niche you choose, one that allows you to maximize your individual talents.

Think like a tiger this year! Be unabashed about your pursuit of market leadership in 2010.

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Luxury Real Estate Branding: What Makes You So Different?

Chanterelle Mushrooms

As a luxury real estate marketing professional, can you state who you are and how you are distinct from your closest competition is a few quick phrases?  If you cannot do this, how do you expect your referrals sources to be able to tell their friends about you and what makes your personal brand different? A good way to learn this personal branding skill is by discovering what makes certain things in nature distinct.  Here is an example.

With recent heavy rains, here in Santa Barbara, California, wild mushroom season is upon us. Suddenly, the beautiful, chanterelle mushrooms, golden in color and worth their weight in gold, appear in the farmer’s market. The trumpet shaped chanterelles are often referred to as the “champagne of mushrooms” or “the queen of the forest”.  In the state of Oregon, they have been deemed the state mushroom due to their symbiotic relationship with Douglas fir trees that are so plentiful in the forests of Oregon.  

Connoisseurs consider wild mushrooms to be the true luxuries of the culinary scene.  While they have little nutritive value they have the power of enhancing the flavor and texture of certain dishes like no other food. Chanterelles, with their unmistakable aroma of apricots and delicate woodsy flavor that holds its own when combined with other food, are prized above all mushrooms by many of the world’s great chefs.

Alexandra discovered a fabulous pizza recipe with chanterelles, pancetta, radicchio and leek.  This is now a staple at our home during wild mushroom season.

Chanterelles are easily identified and can quickly be distinguished from potentially dangerous mushrooms with very little instruction or experience. Unlike many other mushrooms, once a colony of chanterelles is established, it re-emerges in the same location year after year, even when harvested. 

Summary of the unique characteristics of the chanterelle “brand” of mushrooms:

• Golden color
• Trumpet shape
• Aroma of Apricot
• Woodsy flavor that holds its own when combined with other food
• Perennial

 What are your most distinguishing characteristics as a luxury real estate marketing professional?

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Luxury Real Estate Branding: The Spaghetti Bench Mark

A benchmark is something that serves as a standard by which others may be measured or judged.  To be original, as a luxury real estate marketing professional, your personal brand of doing business should set a new standard of excellence in your field. It should raise the bar and become a benchmark.  How else will you become the standout, if market leadership is your quest?

To become a market leader we recommend that you identify and dominate an uncontested market niche. You need to select something that you can do, with passion, better than anyone else in your marketplace and become known for this as your trademark. A trademark is a distinguishing characteristic or feature firmly associated with a person or thing.  You must spot a niche that is underserved and not obvious.  Then, you must claim it as yours and own it.

The Spaghetti Bench, by the Franco-Argentinean artist and designer Pablo Reinoso, is both a benchmark and a trademark series of work. He has taken the ordinary, yet functional park bench and elevated it to something quite extraordinary. It would be next to impossible for another artist or designer to do a similar work without being called a “me-too” or copycat. 

The Spaghetti Bench is truly remarkable!  You just feel compelled to tell others about it. We actually contacted Mr. Reinoso in Paris and asked for his permission to publish his works on the LOL Blog. We were that moved to share it with you.  We hope you pass this post along to your friends, if you are moved by his work as well.

It was an immediate emotional response for both of us when we saw two park benches intertwined, becoming one, yet retaining their individuality.  Reinoso’s works convey what we value the most: innovation. How absolutely outrageous to begin a piece of art in one room and have it continue in another as it transforms from inert to dynamic movement. It spans a spectrum from practical to lyrical and says, “You can have it all!” It reaffirms that we do not live in an ‘either-or” world as many would have us believe, that your lifestyle, your love style and your work style can be a continuum when you live a life of passion.  And, that is part of what defines luxury for us.

When you are willing to step out of the realm of conformity, to free yourself of the tyranny of the status quo and become an original, only then will you have a remarkable personal brand that becomes a benchmark for all others.  Find that which can become your trademark, as a luxury real estate marketing professional, and you will succeed beyond your dreams.

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Luxury Real Estate Branding: Your Unobvious Promise of Value

As a luxury real estate marketing professional, are you having an identity crisis? Are you struggling to articulate your own unique promise of value?  If so you are not alone.  The internet has shaken the very foundation of other service industries, such as travel agencies and stock brokerage firms, by empowering consumers with self-service.  What value are you adding on top of self-service and how do you get that message, your unique promise of value, across better than your competition?  That is the question! 

A while back we were invited to attend a seminar (as observers) in which a room full of highly successful agents were gathered. Every agent there earns at least a $500,000 in gross commissions per year. They were asked to express how they stood out from their closest competition.   They were ALL, without exception, hard-pressed to quickly come up with their unique selling proposition. Integrity, negotiation skills and market knowledge were some of their best answers.  But, there are plenty of agents with similar qualities within their individual marketplaces.  Each of these agents was vulnerable.   A chink in their armor was exposed.

Can you quickly, sharply define and articulate your own personal “DNA” (how you are Different-Not-Alike). If not, erosion of your own market share is inevitable.

No, that is not food coloring in the photo above.  Nor, is it a Photoshop trick. Cauliflower is available in purple, green and “cheddar” in addition to white.  The difference in the DNA of these three varieties of cauliflower is minuscule. However, the taste and the outward appearance of each one is unmistakably distinct.  Each one has its own distinguishing identity.

The same concept of DNA applies to branding for luxury real estate marketing professionals. Your challenge now is this: what may have been obvious before is unobvious now.  You must now make your distinct DNA so obvious that your target market not only picks up on it instantly, but can also easily communicate about your DNA to others. 

As branding experts we can help you accelerate the process of discovering and clearly expressing your DNA, your unique promise of value. The process may take some deep soul searching on your part to recognize what is truly unique and original about YOU in relationship to your competition.  However, our job is to help you make the unobvious, obvious. 

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Luxury Real Estate Blogging: Do You Feel Like a Fish Out of Water?

As a luxury real estate marketing blogger do you feel like a fish out of water?  The source of the “disconnect” that you are experiencing could very well be your lack of passion about that which you are writing. If so, you are OFF your personal brand signal. Unless you discover both your passion AND your own unique voice, which is your personal brand and style as a blogger, you are much better off channeling your energy into other marketing strategies.

Passion alone is not enough! If you are passionate about what you are blogging, the trick is to discover how to present your content CONSISTENTLY in your own inimitable way.  You must be relentless, as your own editor, to STAY ON YOUR UNQUE BRAND SIGNAL.  If you need an outside opinion, hire an editor who can immediately tell when you are on or off your brand signal.

As we stated in Part 1 of this series, ORIGINAL content is what your target audience is craving! Regurgitated or generic information is worthless because your audience can find it elsewhere.  Eventually, they see right through you.  They will brand you as a copycat and stop following you.  Even worse, you will feel hollow (if you are honest with yourself) when you publish non-original material because you are cheating yourself out of the satisfaction that can only come from being original. 

When we coach authors and bloggers, which is a subset of our strategic branding practice, we are hired to help our clients discover their unique voice and DNA, to identify their inimitable brand signal, and also what they are most passionate about.   Usually, it is not a question of discovering something new. But, by drawing out their unique way of expressing their passion it confirms or reaffirms what they already know intrinsically. We help them by reminding them that they are like fish swimming in water but have taken the water for granted.  And, that is always a revelation!

We learned how to decipher and refine our own original ideas when we wrote an internet advertising technology patent in 2002 with our partner, John Ullmen.  It took us two years to file.  Our patent attorney was an absolute task master.  He was the fourth patent attorney that Bill Gates hired and actually wrote many of the patent policies for Microsoft.   He was unrelenting in insisting that what we wrote was original because it simply would not fly at the US Patent Office, otherwise.

Many, many times after arduous work, putting in many 18 hour days we would realize that what we thought was original was already originated by someone else. Finally, we were granted our patent in 2007 because there simply was no precedent (what is known as prior art) for our original work.

Without passion, you simply will not sustain your course of action over time, as a luxury real estate marketing blogger. The real rewards of blogging occur, in addition to generating new business, when your audience offers you feedback that you are indeed a one-of-a-kind author.

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Luxury Real Estate Branding: Canned Content = Canned Brands

Are people following your luxury real estate marketing blog? Are they watching your videos? If you do it right, you can build an entire personal brand and a large audience around your blog and videos. However, if your content is canned, meaning unoriginal or generic, you will not stand out as a distinct brand nor will you be follow-worthy. Canned content equals canned brands.

Have you heard the expression “Content is King” in reference to the internet and social media in particular? Content refers to articles, web copy (text on web pages and blog posts), videos, podcasts and photos. When you distribute content on the internet and include a link to your blog and or website you are basically inviting readers and viewers to find out more about you and your business.

If your video, your blog post or your article is shared with others, who in turn share it with their friends, the exposure that your content receives can expand exponentially.  This is what is meant by the term “viral” which comes from the concept that a virus can be spread in the same manner. It can be like word-of-mouth advertising on steroids! 

The more places you distribute your content the more potential traffic you can generate. Click-throughs on your content can account for over 90% of your web traffic and completely dwarf click-throughs that come from Google or other search engines, even if you are naturally ranked at the top of the first page of search results.  That is the power of content to drive web traffic and that is why ORIGINAL content is king.

If your content is boring, unoriginal or generic your chances of people clicking on your links diminishes accordingly. If you publish recycled, unoriginal material you simply will not be followed, which is the entire point of building an audience of subscribers. Recycling may be good for cans but not for blog posts.

Unoriginal or generic real estate information is a turn-off in luxury real estate in particular. Imagine a Rolls Royce blogger explaining to a potential customer that they are looking at a car with four doors instead of telling them where to find the door mounted umbrella. Generic luxury real estate blog content indicates that the blogger lacks imagination and therefore lacks the marketing savvy required to win listings or sell expensive homes.  

Be original! Canned content equals canned personal brands.

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Personal Branding: Make More Money Faster by Showing Your True Colors

Rainbow Chard at Santa Barbara's Farmers Market

Personal branding for luxury real estate marketing professionals is all about consistently showing your true colors to your ideal target market.  By clearly articulating your true colors, that is, who you are and what you stand for, through your brand identity, you will accelerate the pace of attracting more ideal clients. The more matches you make the more money you make. It is that simple!

Your ideal clients are looking for you just as much as you are looking for them!  But, how will they recognize you if your website and your collateral material look the same as many others?  Do your colors simply blend in when you need to blend out!  If so, it is time for you to do the personal branding “two-step”

Step One

The first step in accelerating the matchmaking process between you and your ideal clients is to identity your own true colors for yourself.  You may know yourself well, implicitly. But, you are invisible to your ideal clients unless you express yourself explicitly.  Most luxury real estate marketing professionals have a vague idea of their own unique promise of value.  This represents a tremendous competitive advantage for those who not only are certain of themselves but who also can express their true colors clearly to others.

Step Two

The second step is defining, with crystal clarity, exactly who your ideal clients are?  This step is extremely important.   You need to know what kind of people you like to work from a personality standpoint and also a business perspective, i.e., how they behave in the process of buying or selling luxury real estate.  You also need to understand their needs, their biggest challenges and what is most pressing on their minds. 

Once you have done the personal branding two step process, you need to express your authentic brand identity. This includes communicating your marketing message in such a way that they quickly grasp that you represent the answers to their prayers. Show your true colors to your ideal clients often and your will not only experience more matches, but you will also make more money, faster.

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Luxury Real Estate Branding: What Does Your Brand Stand For?

Anna Karenina 1878

The Oprah Effect—Part 2

As a luxury real estate marketing professional, what does your personal or company brand stand for?  Can you say it in a few words?  Better yet, can you say what your brand stands for in just one word? 

In a few words, Oprah stands for “building a better life”.  A Yoga teacher in Chicago, Robyn Okrant, committed herself to living the Oprah way (following all of Oprah’s advice) for a year in 2008, and blogging about it.  She now has a book deal, which effectively made her dream come true as she wanted to be a writer.  There is the Oprah Effect in action.

One of the ancillary words that Oprah stands for is “education”.  Oprah is passionate about reading and one of her sub-brands is Oprah’s Book Club. By enrolling her vast audiences in her club she has introduced the public to literature by great and important authors. Now, before she recommends a book, she gives the publisher a “heads up”, so that they can print an additional 500,000 books. 

This is another facet of the Oprah Effect. It only takes 20,000 sold books to become a best seller.  A classic Leo Tolstoy novel, Anna Karenina, usually read by university students studying Russian literature, became a bestseller, thanks to Oprah.  The same thing happened when Oprah recently recommended a novel written in 1985 by Nobel Prize winning Columbian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez,  Love in the Time of Cholera. It was originally published in Spanish. Then, 3 years later it was translated in English.  Neither of these books were best sellers when they were published.

When you express your personal passion it becomes clear that you are doing what you love to do. Oprah’s love for education is evidenced by her building a school in South Africa for girls. Oprah walks her talk with no pretense, no spin, and no hype.  That is why she is one of the most trusted personal brands in the world.

What are you passionate about?  What do you stand for, in a word or a phrase? This is the core of your personal or company brand?

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Luxury Real Estate Branding: Discover the Power of Your Personal Brand

The Oprah Effect-Part 1

Recently CNBC aired a show called the Oprah Effect.  This 42 minute show illustrates the power of Oprah’s personal brand. If you go to Hulu.com you can watch the entire show on your IPhone, on your desktop, on your laptop, and soon on your tablet computer, anywhere, anytime.  In fact, you can even watch it right here on our blog post.  As a luxury real estate marketing professional seeking market leadership, now is the best time ever to build your own personal brand.

Oprah built her personal brand over 26 years. You can build yours in just 2 years if you are willing to seize the incredible opportunity of the new media of internet TV. 

What is the catch?  You need to have a unique voice and you need to create an extraordinary promise of value. You also must be what we call, “follow-worthy,” in order to build an audience and expand your sphere of influence.  With the internet fragmenting the TV market into micro-niches, the goal is to find an uncontested market niche that you can dominate. And, you must be passionate about your niche.

Whenever Oprah likes a product she tells her viewers (44 million a week) about it, and usually interviews the entrepreneurs behind the product.  Within minutes phones start ringing off the hook in those companies.  Carol’s Daughter’s (mentioned in our previous post) beauty products went from a 2 million dollar company to a 20 million dollar company.  You Take the Cake was on the verge of insolvency and now is a thriving concern selling cakes and shipping the batter of their famous key lime cake to the likes of Whole Foods grocery stores.

Oprah is passionate about what she likes and what she believes in. Find your passion and you will discover the power of your personal brand.

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Luxury Real Estate Branding: Discover What Makes You Special?

Dragon Fruit

Quite often, we get calls from luxury real estate marketing professionals asking us for an image makeover in the form of a logo, or a new website that will assure their success in the new age of social media marketing.  They think that is the definition of branding.

The new opportunity on the World Wide Web is to express your unique voice as an expert in some uncontested market niche and to become the market leader in that niche.  People are looking for answers to their most perplexing challenges. They seek a voice that is special, one that they can identify with, a voice that is compelling and follow-worthy. 

This voice cannot be made up by some marketing image maker and cannot be modulated to please others; it has to be the voice that reflects the authentic you. Your voice is your "DNA"!

For example, there is only one dragon fruit (see photo above). It is unique among cactus fruits.  In Taiwan diabetics use the fruit as a food substitute for rice. It is also credited with alleviating respiratory ailments.  Other cactus fruits do not have this claim to fame.

Fabricated images are doomed, at some point, to fail and fade away.  Hype and spin cannot disguise the lack of substance anymore.  The internet has imposed transparency on all fronts.

Branding is not buying a new outfit or simply having a graphic designer design a new logo.  It is discovering your voice and promoting the unique attributes of it.  Once you have discovered it, you must stick to that which you are.  Life becomes a binary world:  what is on your path and what is not on your path—what is on your brand signal and what is off signal.  The design and the logo are dictated by the brand not the other way around.

One of the best definitions of a brand was given by Lisa Price, founder of Carol’s Daughter beauty products.  Because of her understanding of branding, she was able to take her business from her kitchen to the nation at large. She has attracted some of the world’s most famous “spokes beauties”, such as Halle Berry, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Mary J Blige, to sing her praises.

According to Ms. Price,

“When you are an entrepreneur and you are starting your business, it is so important to know what your voice is, and what it is that you bring to the table that is different.  You won’t have a brand, you won’t have an identity if you don’t hold on to that, that makes what you do special.”

Discover what makes you special. Find your unique voice as an expert and you will thrive in this new decade where a personal brand can set you apart from your competition.

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Luxury Real Estate Web Design: De-clutter Your Home Page!

As luxury real estate marketing professionals you understand the importance of staging a home to increase its appeal. One of the first rules of staging is to get rid of the clutter.  It is also important to realize that the same principle applies to your own website, especially your home page. 

What if you approached a home and there were 100 front doors from which to choose your entrance to the home? That is the feeling on many luxury real estate websites that are cluttered with too many bells, whistles, gadgets, links and unclear navigation.

Are you trying to trying to keep up with your competition by adding every conceivable gadget or widget on your home page?  Attempting to please your clients and making sure you are keeping up with your competitor by adding the same gizmos is a sure-fire way to clutter up your website and chase away business. De-clutter your home page by finding a better place for the weather report, the schools, the city hall, the concierge, the news feed, and the webcam. 

Flash Does Not Equal Cash!

Spare your visitors the dizzying flashing slide shows.  Flash does not equal cash! Unless it is used very, very sparingly, subtly and elegantly, Flash can be extremely annoying.  It may create a pleasant effect the first time.  But, it can immediately get old and deter visitors from returning which is the key to the value of your website as a lead capturing tool.

 Flash slide shows, on your home page, are no longer original.  We recently did a thorough competitive analysis for a client in a very upscale marketplace.  We actually viewed the websites of the top 5o agents there.  The overwhelming majority used Flash slide shows on their homepages.  What used to be novel has become commonplace.  Flash slide shows on home pages are now considered a flash in the pan!

Think like a home stager. De-clutter your home page on your website!

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Luxury Real Estate Branding: A Head-shot Is Not A Brand!

YUM-O, DELISH, NUTRISH!

Many luxury real estate marketing professionals confuse their head-shot as being their brand.  The majority of real estate print ads are simply a collection of "heads and houses". As a result, what you get is a sea of sameness. When your competitors all use their head-shot as their brand what makes you distinct? This is part 2 of our previous post, Off With Your Head!

A personal brand is a representation, a symbol that expresses the essence of your authentic self, your unique DNA and, most importantly, what you stand for. A head-shot alone does not comprise a personal brand.

It is possible to use your head-shot as part of your personal brand. But, it must be carried off with the conviction of achieving celebrity status within a marketplace or a niche.  A face without a context does not stand for anything. Martha Stewart stands for “homemaker extraordinaire”. Donald Trump stands for “deal maker par excellence”. Emeril stands for comfort food. 

But, the three letter word  BAM! as Emeril  shouts when he seasons food, completes his brand identity in a single gesture because it communicates his unique flair that is inimitable. BAM! is now a product (BBQ Sauce) that is associated with Emeril’s face.

Rachel Ray also stands for comfort food, but what gives her a distinct brand identity is the "girl next door" trust factor. In fact, Rachel Ray rates higher than Oprah in terms of perceived trust, as a personal brand.  Her “Yum-o” and "Delish" expressions have become her trademarks.  Rachel Ray's pet food brand, “Nutrish” is an extension of her personal brand. 

Here is our answer: If you seek celebrity status, go for it! But, make sure you also communicate what you stand in a logo and or a slogan. Otherwise, the need to use a head-shot in email without a brand context, communicates that you are concerned about being forgettable, which may not be the case. Personal branding done right, as Natalie and Nat King Cole would say, is UNFORGETTABLE IN EVERY WAY!

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing: Think Local When You Blog!

Fully Cusotmizable Vinyl Car Skins--No Paint!

 Lessons from Local Motors—Part 3—Think Local!

Luxury real estate marketing professionals often ask us what they should blog about.   And, we answer:  Think Local!  Look for stories of local heroes and find an angle that no one else is covering.  For example, if you specialize in eco-luxury, look for stories about companies and people who are making news on this front.  Local Motors is such a story.

In fact, the Local Motors story, in our opinion, holds the keys to the future of capitalism, enlightened capitalism. It offers us hope that economics, society and the environment can achieve a balancing act where everyone wins.  It also makes us proud to be Americans because the story is unfolding right here. 

In Part 2 of this series we mentioned that Local Motors offers the unique ownership experience of actually building your own car in a local “micro-factory”, in just two weekends, under the supervision of a Designated Builder Trainer.  When you assemble the parts you will find out, firsthand, the degree to which the actual components of the car are eco-friendly. Here are a few examples:

• The motor used in the Rally Fighter, Local Motors’ first model, is a BMW M57 clean diesel engine.  It offers a fun experience with very low fuel consumption, achieving 36mpg on the highway, or 30mpg in an off-road setting.   The motor relies on extremely high fuel-injection and combustion pressures to burn fuel more completely--dramatically reducing both soot and nitrogen-oxide emissions.
• The body of the car is made of a composite material that can actually be recycled. There is no corrosive steel used that winds up on a junk heap.  In fact, a separate composite material is used for the nose cone and the rear fender that is stronger than steel.
• This car has zero layers of paint! A vinyl car skin is used that can be fully customized by the customer. It lasts for years and is easy on the environment because the color ink is sprayed close to the surface and thus significantly reduces harmful chemicals in the air.

Ecology is much more than just the natural environment; it extends to the community that was built online to design the cars and to engage customers in the process.  As such Local Motors is also a stellar social media story.  By March 2009 there were 2,400 active contributors to the site, uploading drawings, commenting on each others' work, and voting on designs. Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors, says that number has since climbed considerably. Social media channels on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter add millions more people to the Local Motors community.

There are so many wonderful stories right in your marketplace.  You just need to present your story in your own voice, which is what a personal brand is all about.  If you can show your followers that there are exciting and interesting stories right “in their own backyards” you will indeed become what we call “follow-worthy”, and people will spread the word about you.

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing: Preempt Your Competition

Lessons from Local Motors-- Part 2—Preempt Your Competition

In Part 1 of this story we focused on how Local Motors “crowd-sourced” the design of a vehicle for an underserved market niche.  Their first car, the Rally Fighter, is an off-road vehicle (desert terrain) that can double as a family car on the road.  In Part 2 we examine how Local Motors has captured the essence of how the very concept of luxury is evolving. It is becoming experiential not just material.

As a luxury real estate marketing professional, can you state your unique promise of value in just a few words?  Local Motors can:  Make C.O.O.L. Cars!

Community: The world’s largest community of designers, engineers and enthusiasts come together    here to help design and develop cars

Open Source:  Open Source chassis data, open development process (collaboration with no secrets)

Ownership Experience:  From design to build to service and community experiences.

Local:  Cars are built, sold and serviced locally in Micro-Factories

Perhaps, the most unique aspect of Local Motors is the ownership experience. When you purchase your vehicle you are invited to work alongside the experts to build it.  Based on your skill level, a customized program is designed to give you hands on experience.  It takes only two weekends (6 days) to build your own car and you will have a Designated Builder Trainer to help you.  According to Local Motors, “When you come into one of the Local Motors micro-factories you will be sure to meet friends for life”. For car enthusiasts, this brand of ownership experience is true luxury!

By breaking new ground with this experiential ownership model any other car company will appear as a “copy cat”.  It is what we call a pre-emptive strategy that is virtually inimitable without becoming a “me-too” brand.  This is the sign of market leadership.

How can you break new ground in your luxury real estate market arena and preempt your competition?

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing: Find an Underserved Market Space

Rally Fighter at Low Ride & High Ride Height

Lessons from Local Motors- Part 1—Find an Underserved Market Space

We are often asked by luxury real estate marketing professionals, “What does it take to become the break-away brand in my marketplace?”  Our answer is:

Find an uncontested, underserved market space that you can dominate with passion, one that makes economic sense. Make sure you select something that you can do better than anyone else. 

For inspiration, look outside of real estate for examples of how other entrepreneurs are doing it.  There is an extremely exciting news story emerging in 2010 about a new American car company that is re-thinking just about every rule in the automotive industry by identifying and masterfully serving underserved market niches.

We are delighted to be covering this story in the Language of Luxury blog as we believe that this ground-breaking story will yield tremendous insights for luxury real estate marketing professionals who have set their sights on market leadership.  If you have any questions about the future of “Yankee Ingenuity”, which is at the heart of the brand we know as American, you can rest assured that it is alive and well at Local Motors!

When Jay Rogers returned from active duty as a Marine in Iraq in 2004, he came home with the brilliant idea of bringing cars to market in a sustainable manner.  That is, a way to produce and sell automobiles that is economically, environmentally and socially beneficial.  In Jay’s words:”the cars people want, where they want them, when they want them”. This is what his new car company, Local Motors, accomplishes.

After receiving an MBA from Harvard Business School and raising $4 million in seed money Jay did something that had never been done before in the car industry. Rather than dictating the design of the vehicles, he reached out to the design community and offered a cash reward for the best design. Local Motor’s first “crowd-sourced” vehicle was born: a rugged off-road vehicle that could also drive comfortably on the open road. 

The Rally Fighter was created based on the needs of an underserved market niche: the need for a vehicle that can easily traverse desert terrain and also double as a family car that comfortably handles the open road.  The winning design provides manually adjustable dual height suspension. It seats 4 adults or 2 adults and 3 children. The Rally Fighter goes into production this summer.  The cost is $50,000.

But, the best part of the story is that Local Motors plans to produce their cars only on demand at local “micro-factories” (that also serve as showrooms and service departments) where you, the buyer can watch and even participate in making your own car.  With “just in time” delivery of parts and components there is no wasted resources, no inventories languishing on car lots, and no unnecessary shipping. 

And, there is much more to this exciting story that we will cover in subsequent posts. But, it all started by identifying an uncontested, underserved market niche.   What aspect of your local luxury real estate marketplace is underserved?  That is the first place to look for your new niche.

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing: Dominate The Uncontested Market Space

Recently, we responded to an S.O.S from a successful luxury real estate marketing professional who put out this distress signal:  I have been blogging consistently. Why is no one commenting or following me?  Is there anyone out there?  For those of you who are experiencing the same frustration, here is an important tip: Discover and dominate an under served market niche

A niche is specialized market. It is a market segment or a particular market “space”.  An example of a niche in luxury real estate would be historic homes. When we were in commercial real estate in Beverly Hills we specialized in high end retail and the entertainment industry.  One of our jobs was to find potential tenants for retail stores and shopping centers that we represented exclusively, on Rodeo Drive, or surrounding areas.

In doing some research for an upcoming blog series we found an excellent analogy for niches by Ray Wert on his Jalopnik.com blog.  He referred to niches as the spaces between the marbles in a Mason jar that is full of marbles.  If you were to pour sand in the jar it would fill those spaces and there would be a surprising amount of room for the sand.  Only when you can no longer add sand is the jar really “full”. The marbles represent what everyone else is doing, the niches exist in those spaces between the marbles that the sand fills.

To be successful as a blogger, as a luxury real estate marketing professional, you must first identify an uncontested market “space”.  The first place to look is for an under served consumer group.  It must be a niche about which you can write passionately.  It needs to be a market segment for which you can offer an extraordinary promise of value, value that cannot be found elsewhere. And, you must blog in your own unique voice, your authentic style.  That is, if you want to build an audience and be follow-worthy over time.  

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The 2010 Imperative: Differentiate with Personal/Company Branding!

In 2010 you have a choice as a luxury real estate marketing professional:  Stand Out or Bow Out! Consumers now have a plethora of choices and a scarcity of time.  Your competition is just one click away.  It is now an imperative to DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF and instantly communicate your unique promise of value with laser sharpness, in a nano-second.  Check out these personal and company branding videos:   

The Power of Personal Branding for

Luxury Real Estate Agents

Strategic Branding for Companies

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing: The Contrarian Approach

Our digital world has brought about some wonderful efficiency in communication and has reduced costs.  But, it has also made it easier to lose the personal touch which has now become a luxury.  This opens up a tremendous opportunity for luxury real estate marketing professionals to gain a competitive edge by thinking like a contrarian.

In a time starved world where email-only customer service is the order of the day, a personal phone call can go a long way to build client loyalty.   Here is an example.

Recently, a mistake was made on our account by an internet service to which we subscribe and our account was suspended.  The only way that this could be remedied was via email customer service.  There was no phone number given on their Contact Us page.  Frustration set in because it took way too much time to write them and prove that the mistake was theirs not ours. Two days later the account was suspended again for the same reason.   Again, the burden of proof was on us which took more of our time. And, we are one of their best customers!

This reminded us the Lily Tomlin sketch on Saturday Night Live where she played Ernestine the telephone operator.  Her famous lines were, “I work for the phone company and it is not my job to think!” And, “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We are the phone company.”

Finally, we requested, by email, that a senior executive of the company call us, as there was no resolution via email customer service. Plus, we were ready to find a new service provider.   We did get a call and the solution became apparent to the executive in less than 30 seconds.  We now have her direct phone number which is rarely given out.

If your competition in luxury real estate is heading in one direction take the opposition direction and stand out. Be a contrarian. Maintain your personal touch, even after you have sold the home.  It will go a long way to build client loyalty and referrals.

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing: In Praise of Snail Mail!

Photo by Jurgen Schoner

"Luxury is making an impression, without making a scene"-Yaffa Assouline.

A handwritten note to a prospective client expresses you care in a nanosecond.  One of our clients welcomes his out of town buyers with a handwritten note placed in their hotel room along with a small box of chocolates from a local purveyor.  Would you want to buy a home from anyone else?  The initial conversation may have started by email, and he may have sent a text message alerting his client regarding a new listing. 

In the not so distant past, people made beautiful boxes to keep love letters. A love letter is a treasure, a keepsake, a touchstone of a cherished moment!  Would you profess you love in a text message or via email?  Would the recipient file it in a folder on their hard drive under documents/love letters? 

People purchased beautiful stationary to send thank you notes, and invitations to events.  They sent birthday cards and anniversary cards.  They bought special commemorative stamps to match the stationary and the event.  Some still do. So, the US Post Office sells customized stamps.  Another client sent invites to her opening party at her new office with her picture on the stamp.  Would you want anyone else to market your home?

Balance high tech with low tech marketing.  You will be surprised and delighted at the results.

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