Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Luxury Real Estate Personal & Company Branding: The High Cost of Misjudging Your Target Market – Part 1

When crafting your personal or company brand, as a luxury real estate marketing professional, it is crucial to accurately access the demographics and the psycho graphics - the mindset of your target market.  Otherwise your brand can miss the mark and not resonate with your ideal clients. Avoid the high cost of misjudging your target market at all costs!

Year after year Louis Vuitton is recognized as the world’s most valuable luxury brand.  It sells its products through standalone boutiques, lease departments in high-end department stores and also online. The brand itself is valued at over $19 billion, and the company is valued in 2012 at $25.9 billion, according to Bloomberg.

In 2012, Louis Vuitton shuttered its boutique in Santa Barbara. In 2011, in the same upscale shopping center, Ruth Chris, the famous steak house chain with over 130 restaurants, also closed its Santa Barbara doors. What happened?

Certainly, the Santa Barbara demographics can support high-end retail stores and upscale restaurants.  But, are the psycho graphics, the mindset of the target market, a match? In this neighborhood of large estates owned by"old money"  they are not. 

Just a few blocks away Chuck's of Hawaii, thrives. It began serving award-winning steaks and seafood over 45 years ago. The inside is romantically lit and is casually furnished with wood tables anound chairs. A bartender in a Hawaiian shirt serves their famous Mai-Thais as well as a wide variety of local wines. Their dinner menu is still hand painted on bottles of Lancers’ wine.
The décor of Ruth Chris restaurants is considerably more formal than Chuck’s and that is where it miscalculated the Santa Barbara psycho graphic.  Chuck serves free high end hors d’oeuvres during Happy Hour, which packs people in and creates a buzz that, attracts a strong dinner crowd. 

In adjacent Montecito, Lucky’s Steak House also thrives.  This is an intimate, smaller neighborhood restaurant that caters to a higher concentration of the upper demographics, than the general population of Santa Barbara.
Accurately judging both the demographics and the psycho graphics of your target market is like fine-tuning a radio.  If your brand is not right on the money you will get static instead of a clear signal. And, static can be very costly in terms of wasted marketing dollars.
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