Luxury Real Estate Marketing Tips: Is Your Phone Sharing Secrets About YOU?

This is an important update to one of the our most popular article series of 2013 entitled, “Is Privacy the New Luxury Expenditure?”  This article is about the challenge of keeping your smartphone privacy-safe, not just your computers. 

Several new startups are popping up that can, through sensors, track your physical location down to the square meter when you have Wi-Fi enabled on your smartphone.  One company has placed sensors in about 200 local businesses in a Canadian city within a one-mile radius that track the whereabouts of shoppers, unknowingly, as they move around town. 

These companies know which gym you frequent, which coffee shops and restaurants you visit, which movies you see, on a certain day. They can sense if you are just window-shopping or if you actually come into the store immediately afterwards. 

It is not just the raw information they glean that is most alarming. It is what the information means.  Algorithms can determine if you are a jogger if they can track your movements across a park between certain times of the day. They can determine where you live based on where you are during the hours when you sleep.  They can determine your age by the hours you spend at a certain school. 

It is one thing for restaurant owners to know how many of their customers in general are from an upscale neighborhood.  It is another if they can identify YOU in particular as living in that neighborhood. 

When you log into “free” Wi-Fi using Facebook, at a coffee shop that subscribes to these marketing services, for example, they do collect your name, your age, your gender, and have access to your social media profile.  By cross-referencing your whereabouts with your PERSONAL profile they can learn way too much without your consent, just by inference! 

As a luxury real estate marketing professional, ask yourself this question: "What if that coffee shop owner is a potential client who is choosing between you and your competition?

Be deliberate about enabling Wi-Fi on your phones.  Understand that when you login to Wi-Fi using Facebook that you might be giving personal information away. This information may be innocuous in and of itself. But, it can also be analyzed and aggregated by powerful computers that correlate this information with data about your whereabouts at certain times that accurately yields additional meanings. 

And, remember that privacy is indeed a luxury.

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

-WATCH VIDEOS-

 Buzz-Worthy Luxury Real Estate Websites  

Personal Branding Case Studies   Company Branding Case Studies  

About Language of Luxury 

- JOIN THE LOL COMMUNTIY - 

 GET FLUENT. GET AFFLUENT! 

 Linked In, Facebook, Active Rain

Follow Us on Twitter: LuxuryMarketing

Marketing Luxury Real Estate: How to Get Invited to the High-End Listing Presentation? - Part 2

Audrey Hepburn, courtesy of Wikipedia

In Part 1 of this series we stated that to in order to get invited to high-end listing presentations “YOU GOTTA HAVE GLAM!” Glamour is the attractive or exciting quality that makes certain people or things seem appealing or special.  It is the allure, the fascination the charm the magic, the romance, and the mystique that captures attention and sparks word-of-mouth advertising.  

You would think that having Competence, Communication and Care alone would be enough to build a very strong luxury real estate marketing practice. Well, it is possible if you have the patience to build your reputation one client at a time. But, to get there faster and with much less effort you need to rapidly broaden your referral base. And, that takes GLAM. 

On a professional level glamour is a combination of two essential elements: 

1. Extraordinary Packaging that AMPLIFIES your unique promise of value to your target market.

2. Charisma: The compelling PROJECTION of your inner certainty. 

The combination of extraordinary packaging and charisma creates a MAGNETISM that can ACCELERATE the pace at which you achieve top-of-mind status and can also CATAPULT you to the top of the “A List” for listing presentations.

In Part 3 we will discuss how having extraordinary packaging and charisma without the substance of competence, communication and care is tantamount to walking on thin ice.  Eventually, your shortcomings will be exposed and your foundation will crumble. 

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

-WATCH VIDEOS-

 Buzz-Worthy Luxury Real Estate Websites  

Personal Branding Case Studies   Company Branding Case Studies  

About Language of Luxury 

- JOIN THE LOL COMMUNTIY - 

 GET FLUENT. GET AFFLUENT! 

 Linked In, Facebook, Active Rain

Follow Us on Twitter: LuxuryMarketing

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

WATCH VIDEOS-

 Buzz-Worthy Luxury Real Estate Websites 

Personal Branding Case Studies   Company Branding Case Studies 

About Language of Luxury

- JOIN THE LOL COMMUNTIY - 

 GET FLUENT. GET AFFLUENT! 

 Linked In, Facebook, Active Rain

Follow Us on Twitter: LuxuryMarketing

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.

WATCH VIDEOS-

 Buzz-Worthy Luxury Real Estate Websites 

Personal Branding Case Studies   Company Branding Case Studies 

About Language of Luxury

- JOIN THE LOL COMMUNTIY - 

 GET FLUENT. GET AFFLUENT! 

 Linked In, Facebook, Active Rain

Follow Us on Twitter: LuxuryMarketing

Luxury Real Estate Personal and Company Branding: Can a Brand be Saved?

Recently, I (Alexandra, here) was reading an article written by the Knowledge@Wharton from the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania.  This article discussed the fate of the Lance Armstrong brand as well as his charitable organization, Livestrong founded to support cancer survivors.  The discussion was well thought out and made sense.   Here is an excerpt, to read more...

 “Livestrong was built on the cult of Armstrong’s personality,” Katherina Rosqueta, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy.  “That personality has now gone from being an asset to a liability. If Livestrong can show meaningful impact for the funds it has raised, then it can probably survive this. If it can’t, it won’t”

Over time, Americus Reed, a Wharton marketing professor, predicts that Armstrong’s image as the face of the charity will fade. “People will always remember he started it, but it’s not clear to me right now that there will be a long-term negative impact on Livestrong,” he says. “As this goes on for Lance, however, with no statement and continued denial, his brand is going to continue to decay.”

What impressed me most was a comment made by a reader. Christopher Lambert:

If we say Lance is irredeemable aren't we passing the same sentence on the worst parts of our self?

One of the risks of being a celebrity is the fact that the media is just as capable making you an overnight success as it is capable of instantly destroying your reputation. It leaves little room for redemption. What the media is counting on is that their audience does not think for themselves like Christopher Lambert did.

What do you think?

WATCH VIDEOS

 Buzz-Worthy Luxury Real Estate Websites 

 Personal Branding Case Studies   Company Branding Case Studies 

 About Language of Luxury

 - JOIN THE LOL COMMUNTIY - 

 GET FLUENT. GET AFFLUENT! 

  Linked In, Facebook, Active Rain

 Follow Us on Twitter: LuxuryMarketing