Luxury Real Estate Marketing Tip: Life is What You Make of It

Photo by Petifrere

One of the great poets/songwriters of our time is Paul Simon.  His genius is getting under your skin with words that appear to be non-sequitur (out of context).  But somehow, the meaning comes through and moves you, profoundly. 

This New Year’s Eve, when many are making resolutions, the lyrics of one of his most recent great songs, So Beautiful or So What (April 8, 2011) inspired us. He felt it was his best work 20 years. And, we wanted to share it with you.  We believe deeply that life is truly what you make of it. 

Here is the video of his performance of the song.  See lyrics below.  This is not an official video but you can hear the song on You Tube Here

So Beautiful or So What (Music and Lyrics by Paul Simon)

I'm gonna make a chicken gumbo

Toss some sausage in the pot

I'm gonna flavor it with okra

CAYENNE pepper to make it hot

You know life is what we make of it

So beautiful or so what

I'm gonna tell my kids a bedtime story

A play without a plot

Will it have a happy ending?

Maybe yeah, Maybe not

I tell them life is what you make of it

So beautiful or so what

So beautiful, so beautiful

So what

I'm just a raindrop in a bucket

A coin DROPPED in a slot

I am an empty house on Weed Street

Across the road from a vacant lot

You know life is what you make of it

So beautiful or so what

Aint it strange the way we're ignorant

How we seek out bad advice

How we jigger it and figure it

Mistaking value for the price

And play a game with time and Love

Like a pair of rolling dice

So beautiful, so beautiful

So what

Four men on the balcony

Overlooking the parking lot

Pointing at a figure in the distance

Dr. King has just been shot

And the sirens long melody

Singing savior pass me not

Aint it strange the way we're ignorant

How we seek out bad advice

How we jigger it and figure it

Mistaking value for the price

And play a game with time and love

Like a pair of rolling dice

So beautiful, so beautiful

So what!

Wishing everyone a happy and prosperous 2013, Cheers, Ron & Alexandra

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Marketing Luxury Real Estate: The Quest for the Best!

On August 20,2008, we wrote about the best in class of taquerias in Santa Barbara.  It is still one of our favorite places here.  Friday, we were there for lunch and marveled that each time we go, it is as good as we remembered from the last time we were there.  This restaurant has exsited since the early 80's and each time we leave there is a line forming out of the door, and it continues to form down the block daily.  

We used this example as being the best in class in their niche and consistently getting the best results and the best word of mouth referral.  When tourists are in town, we make sure we get there just before they open at 11:00 AM, and get in line with the other smart locals...

La Superica is the best in its class, the best Mexican food in town at any price. The Robb Report, known as “the Global Luxury Source”, listed La Surperica as one of the top 100 restaurants in the world. We call this practical luxury. It’s not about the money. It’s about the quest for the best!

Wishing you all the best in 2013, Cheers, Ron & Alexandra

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing Tip: Adopting a Beginner's Mind-Part 3

In this third post about the beginner’s mind, we leave you with a single, highly focused thought, in the Zen tradition, for those who market luxury real estate.

When Kobe Bryant, the famed Los Angeles Laker, was just 8 years old he shot 82 successful free throws in a row. When asked how he did it he simply answered, “I did not know I couldn’t do it”.
That is the true secret behind a beginner’s mind.

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing Tip: Try Basecamp for Listing and Marketing Coordination

Sometimes you need to go outside of the real estate industry to find the best (and simplest) systems for luxury real estate marketing coordination and listing coordination.   We highly recommend Basecamp, a cloud-based project management software-as-a-service. 

Basecamp lets you create a custom template with To Do lists in your own words.  Save the template and use it for all of your listings (you can always make modifications for specific listings).  Each listing becomes a project. Because it is web-based your entire team (e.g., your assistant, your photographer, co-listing agents, etc.) can all have access to it from anywhere. 

Documents and photos can easily be uploaded to any To Do item (or the project in general) and shared. To Do’s can be assigned and added to a calendar which all can view. Emails are sent to the person assigned to the task with a link back to the specific To Do for that specific listing in Basecamp. 

Task specific discussions for any given listing/project are all in one place.  You do not have to search through your email inbox to find related items that may not be identified in the email subject line. 

Nothing gets lost!  If someone accidentally deletes something, you the owner, can easily retrieve it.  

Customer service and tech support at Basecamp is superlative!  That is so important given the need for speedy response on something that is at the core of your luxury real estate marketing practice: Listings and marketing! 

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Luxury Real Estate Personal & Company Branding: The "Hailo" Effect

Luxury real estate marketing professionals often ask us about the importance of selecting the right brand name.  It really comes down to how fast and easy you want to make it for your potential referral sources to remember your name, because top-of-mind status IS the name of the referral game. 

In marketing luxury real estate, previous conventional wisdom focused primarily on your “sphere of influence”, those people who know you directly and think highly of you.  But, with the advent of the Internet and social media the very concept of your sphere can change radically.

The fundamentals of staying in touch with your immediate sphere still apply.  But, now there is a potential to have a continuously expanding  “peripheral sphere of influence” comprised of people you have never met!  And, the aggregate of that sphere can literally become a significant source of referrals. 

Here is an example:  A couple comes to your town on vacation, has a great time and is inspired to purchase a second home in your marketplace. They ask a local, a stranger, “Who is the best real estate agent or broker in the area? Now, if you can get your name to come up first for that local person, even if that person is not in the market to buy or sell their home right now, that person is in your peripheral sphere of influence. 

Don’t you think it is important to make it easy for that person to remember your name, first? 

Some of the best brand names are those that you hear once or see once and never forget.  Here is an example of one of those great brand names: HAILO, the taxi app or iPhones and Androids.  This name may be more significant for those of you who live in a major city and frequently use taxis for transportation.  But, once you have heard about it once you are very unlikely to forget it.  

With just a couple of taps of your phone you hail a cap and it tells you what your wait time will be.  No more flailing arms to summon a cab!  Then, as soon as you step out of the cap at your destination, it sends you a receipt, because your credit cards are on file for immediate payment with the app.  The service is available in New York, London, Tokyo, Chicago and five other cities so far. 

Graphically, the logo is very simple. HAIL on one line, O just below. Black letters with “yellow cab” yellow background. It is a better way to hail a cab in just one word. 

There are many tried-and-true principles and approaches that can be applied in crafting a great brand name. Selecting the right approach for your luxury real estate practice or your company in your marketplace is the key.  It must fit the essence of who you are.  And, it must help you differentiate you from your competition. 

Is it worth taking the time to make the right brand name choice? It is if you want to capitalize on and expand your peripheral sphere of influence.

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing Tip: Adopting a Beginner's Mind-Part 2

 

How to Begin a New Client Relationship

 As a luxury real estate marketing professional, the best way to begin a new client relationship is with a beginner’s mind.  That is, with no preconceived ideas, a readiness to help and most importantly, an eagerness to listen and learn as if you had the ears of an elephant. 

You may be the leading authority in your market niche. You may have built a strong reputation as the leading expert in your area.  But, the more advanced you become in your field the more it becomes necessary to adopt the beginner’s mind because the tendency is to rely just on past experience.   By assuming that you know better or by not being genuinely open to hear the nuances of what your new clients need you may miss the mark all together. 

Take the time to discover exactly what is needed and wanted.  Some clients are not yet clear about their answers.  In this case, your job is to guide them in discovering what they need by asking questions that lead to their own self-discovery. 

Ask what your new client expects of you.  Listen for unrealistic expectations.  How you handle them will set the course of your relationship.

If this sounds too fundamental to you, you may currently not be in your beginner’s mind.  It is really easy to live on “auto-pilot mode” especially if you are an accomplished professional.  That is why championship caliber athletes practice the fundamentals over and over again.  

We recently sat through a meeting with a successful loan broker (with a 30 year track record) and his potential client.  The loan broker spent more time talking about himself and his own financial situation than he did listening to the client’s needs. We were amazed!  

After wasting our time, it turned out that he could not help this client, a fact that could have been determined in five minutes. Finally, he was able to refer the client to someone who possibly could help, which is doubtful if the “birds of a feather flock together” rule applies.  But, he lost two potential referral sources for himself in the process simply because he talked too much instead of listening more! 

Listen and learn with a beginner’s mind whenever you meet with a new client.  Even if you are not the right professional to help them, you may gain a potential referral source that you previously did not have. Remember to put on your elephant ears!

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Personal & Company Branding: Adopting The "Beginner's" Mind

Using technology and Internet marketing has increasingly become a mainstay in the field of marketing luxury real estate.  It is humbling, to say the least, to discover that your competitors have been the first to adopt the latest and greatest technology and you just at the beginning of the learning curve.  Instead of wallowing in frustration here is a tip to help you get up to speed faster: Embrace a “beginner’s mind”.

A “beginner’s mind” is a term often used in Zen. It is a state of mind that is free of pre-conceptions about a new subject, free of pretending that you know, and also free of self-criticism for not knowing or doubting that you can learn the subject easily. It is a state of genuine curiosity and eagerness to learn.

It is easy for adults to become jaded.  To understand this state of mind better, think of the perspective of a child who is discovering ice cream for the first time.  What would it be like to rediscover your own marketplace with this mindset?

In our strategic branding and marketing consulting practice for luxury real estate agents and brokerage firms, each time we take on a new client we start our consulting engagement with a trip to their marketplace at no extra charge to our clients. This gives us a chance to have some real face time with clients. It also makes it possible to quickly study and thoroughly learn about their marketplace

By being there, with beginner’s minds, we invariably discover exciting nuances about these markets and find non-obvious business development opportunities that can give our clients a competitive advantage.

We advise our clients to continuously take a fresh look at their marketplace through the eyes of their new clients who are discovering it for the first time.  With a beginner’s mind, you can more readily discover the best way to serve your luxury real estate buyers and sellers.

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Luxury Real Estate Personal & Company Branding: Sensory Branding

Some of the most successful examples of luxury real estate personal or company branding are those brands that strike an emotional chord with ideal clients. One of the best ways to engage prospective buyers and sellers is through repetitive sensory impressions that make you stand out from your competition. 

Most people associate branding with a visual symbol like the Nike “swoosh” or the silhouette of a rabbit (Playboy) or the LV monogram (Louis Vuitton). Some products have a distinct smell that creates and positive olfactory memories. With enough repetitive sensory impressions consumers can often identify a brand from a great distance, by sight (without words), or with just one whiff. 

Auditory branding is another way to create an indelible impression of your brand. Joel Beckerman has actually won awards for “sonic branding” and has a roster of Fortune 500 clients who believe in this brand strategy.  You may have heard his “whoooosh” when you have sent email on an iMac or any other email enabled Apple product.  If you heard that “auditory logo” while watching a TV show in which the character was sending an email, you would instantly know that the computing device (even if it were not visible on screen) was an Apple computer or device.

Engaging the senses in your branding creates an emotional connection with your target market that can give you a significant competitive advantage. But, it must communicate your unique brand personality and also be consistent throughout your communication channels.

For one of our lender clients, who brokered jumbo loans for luxury real estate, we created a motion website graphic of his logo zooming down a road and coming to a screeching halt in the foreground, with full sound effects.  He was obviously into cars.   This resonated perfectly with his ideal clients who could appreciate it.(See Case Study)

What are some ways that you can incorporate sights smells and sounds into your own branding in order to create a strong, positive emotional brand for yourself or your company?   

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Marketing Luxury: Christmas in Beverly Hills-Where is the Joy?

The theme in the bright colored pennants in Beverly Hills this Christmas season is "Live Joy".  Bija,n known for dressing moguls and royals, was the only one to express this sentiment as seen in the lead photo.  Here is a tour of what we saw:

Ralph Lauren's window was beautifully composed. The mannequins looked bored. X-mas Ennui (French for boredom)

Tom Ford's windows featured Christmas in gray with gray boxes and mannequins dressed in gray.

Cartier had its signature playful panther batting the red boxes. Even the cat is subdued.

Louis Vuitton's good wishies came in 4-leaf clovers...

and in wishbones displays, but the message was way too subtle  and understated for the SEASON of JOY. 

An origami wreath at David Yurman was innovative, but against a bleak background?

Rodeo Drive's median had bare fake white trees (between the live palm trees) with white lights (you can barely see them in the photo). There are also  a few hanging white stars (again, you have to look carefully to find them here) as its only other  decor apart from the red pennants that proclaim, "Live Joy".  But, with the exception of Bijan, none of these purveyors of luxury on Rodeo Drive exemplified the primary marketing message.  Where is the Joy?

Cheers, Ron & Alexandra

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing Tip: Fight or Take Flight?

As a luxury real estate marketing professional it is essential that you understand that luxury is a relative term.  The word has been strongly associated with the lifestyles of the rich and famous and primarily with conspicuous consumption and being ostentatious.  But, there is so much more to the meaning of luxury than glitz and glamour.

Perhaps you saw the recent 60 Minutes TV show that featured two extreme stories about luxury.  One story was about a Korean prison camp escapee whose concept of luxury was eating boiled chicken because he was only fed cabbage and gruel his entire life.  Certainly, we have heard of extreme poverty in underdeveloped countries.  But, never have we heard of three generations of prisoners who were being punished for the political crimes of their forefathers. 

The other story was about a psychiatrist who realized a dream of creating the first airplane powered solely with solar energy, one that could fly at night using the stored solar power from the previous day. To this visionary, luxury was the satisfaction of achieving his individual potential. 

It is utterly amazing to conceive that such extremes can co-exist in modern times.  But, such is the current state of human nature.  How is it possible that one man can fight so fiercely just for the right to find nourishment, while another man can let his imagination take flight, beating all odds to make the impossible, possible? 

Abraham Maslow was best known for creating the hierarchy of human needs. He addressed these extremes when we expounded upon the spectrum between the need for physical health and safety through the need to belong, the need for self-esteem (and the esteem of other) and the need for self-realization.   

The upper tiers of this hierarchy is where you find most luxury real estate buyers.  Yet, throughout each tier is the yearning of the human spirit to take flight, to rise above it all, physically, mentally and emotionally. The rewards of satisfying one’s needs, each step of the way, is what true luxury is all about.  

Take the time to genuinely understand the needs of your clients. Understand what luxury means to them. This will serve you well and will enable you to serve your clients better than ever.

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