The Language of Luxury

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Friday, October 1, 2010

Luxury Real Estate Marketing Essentials: The Business of Luxury

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“Why do I need to know how the watch market is doing? I’m in the business of luxury”, Patrick Heiniger, CEO, Rolex

Real Estate marketing professionals can learn from this quote, because luxury is a product category by itself. Like Rolex, you are in the business of luxury. Stay focused on the luxury market and its trends. Every market has its opportunities, and the luxury buyers can afford those opportunities. Make yourself visible in those circles where people are thriving and buying. Pay attention to the good news out there. It is more plentiful than the bad news, if you look for it.

Being in the business of luxury, it is important to get acquainted and understand the customs and the ways of buyers who are here from other countries. Rolex and other luxury brands understand the global market place. They know what works and doesn't work. They study the customs and ways of each country and tailor their marketing for success.

Recently there has been a lot of talk about reaching out to the Chinese market. One of the resources that focuses on China Luxury is Red Luxury. Here is one of their headlines, "There are 1,363 individuals with personal wealth of a billion Chinese yuan (US$150 million) in 2010, up from 1,000 in 2009 according to the Hurun Report, a luxury publishing repo..."

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Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Luxury Real Estate Marketing: The Truth Is in the Details

Photo by Raluca Tudor:Dreamstime.com

In luxury real estate marketing and branding, "the truth is in the details". Refinement, subtlety and simplicity are often the benchmark of sophistication and brilliant design. Studying the most highly recognized brands in the world often yields great insights. Take Giorgio Armani, for example.

Giorgio Armani is, perhaps, one of the world's most famous names and international luxury brands. Take a close look at the details in the logo. At first glance the logo appears to be very simple. It is a single font that is spaced close together. At first glance the logo appears to be almost ordinary.

Now look at how each of the letters in the name Armani itself connect at the bottom or at the top. Notice that that is not the case in his first name. These extremely clean lines that you also find in most of his clothes design are mirrored here in a very subtle manner.

Alexandra discovered Giorio Armani in small article in Vogue magazine well before his clothes were world renown. We decided to visit his boutique in Milan while we were on a reconnaissance mission. Our job was to discover possible tenants for a Beverly Hills retail property that we were handling as commercial real estate brokers. Alexandra asked the taxi driver to take us to Giorgio Armani’s (she speaks Italian) and we were driven to his appartment! She finally was able to explain that we wanted to visit his store. He obviously was not very famous at that point ourside of Milan.

While Alexandra was trying on several items of clothing at the store, a gentleman insisted that Ron try on an outfit that was comprised of a tweed sportcoat, a check shirt and a striped tie which seemed to fly in the face of every sensible American design principle. Much to Ron’s surprise it all worked together. That was the end of traditional design in his wardrobe; no more pinstripe suits and wingtip shoes, the uniform of commercial real estate brokers in Los Angeles, then.

The discovery of fine Italian clothing opened both sets of our eyes to the importance of quality design in branding. It was part of what set our brand apart, as a husband and wife real estate team, from our competition. As niche market leaders in high end retail and also in entertainment industry office leasing and sales, this was one of our first lessons in branding: The truth is in the details.

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Luxury Real Estate Marketing: The Key to Serving Multiple Price Points!

Recently, we were approached by a marketing director of a high profile boutique luxury real estate marketing firm that is the market leader in their area, with an important question that we hear quite often:

“Higher priced homes in our marketplace are not selling very fast. We see the opportunity to sell a high volume of lower priced homes in surrounding neighborhoods. Should we create a new brand for this market segment or keep the same brand?”

There is a risk of keeping the same brand name when you change the identity of your services. The owners of the lower priced homes may feel intimidated by your brand which is already associated with higher priced homes. The owners of the higher priced homes may feel like you have diluted the quality of “their” brand. There may be no intention of being pretentious on anyone’s part, but brand perception plays a very important role in the listing process and in the referral process as well.

The entire exercise of personal or company branding or product branding is to achieve top-of-mind status in a specific category of business or a product category. The brass ring of branding is to be totally identified with a category. The grand prize is being the “category killer” like Scotch Tape. The crowning glory is having your brand name become a verb that literally means that category like “to Xerox” (copy) or “to Fed-Ex” (ship overnight), or “to Google” (search on the internet).

Why would you want to blur a brand that is so sharply defined and associated with a specific category when you can easily create a new brand name for the new category? It just does not make good business sense. But, if you create a sub-brand be sure to stake your claim as the best brand in the new category so your sub-brand can become top-of mind in that category.

This week we were sent a few bottles of wine from a Napa Valley wine club to which we belong. Unbeknownst to us, this famous winery created a sub-brand with a new name. They basically rebranded the wines that they were already producing and we were enjoying from the adjacent area, Alexander Valley. Previously, these wines had the same brand name as their Napa & Sonoma Valley wines. We thought there was some mistake and were pre-disposed to tasting an inferior wine, just because of the brand name change.

There was a breach of trust that occurred because there was no bridge in the communication that endorsed the new brand. All that was necessary was a very simple statement, something like this:

“We felt that our wines from the Alexander Valley had a distinct set of characteristics due the special micro-climate there and these wines merited their own label”

The key to serving multiple price points is definitely to create a separate brand name or a sub-brand. But, that does not mean that your sub-brand should be perceived as sub-par.

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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Luxury Real Estate Marketing: Is Your Slogan Laser Sharp or Is it Gibberish?

Have you considered billboard advertising to establish your personal brand in your luxury real estate marketing practice? In most upper tier markets this just does not work. But, then there are other markets where billboard advertising can help you achieve top-of-mind status rather quickly. We saw this work quite effectively for our client, the reigning market leader in the most highly trafficked tourist destination in California, Napa Valley.

With billboard advertising you only have seconds to create a lasting impression. The key is to get your messaging laser sharp so that it resonates with the most pressing needs of your target market.

While driving at 65 miles per hour on a Southern California freeway we noticed an outstanding billboard for a boutique bank by the name of OneWest Bank. The message was absolutely brilliant:

“Jumbo Loans without the Mumbo Jumbo”

In just six clever words OneWest Bank conveyed their entire promise of value for their luxury real estate lending services. For those of you who have not heard the expression “mumbo jumbo” it means complicated language usually intended to obscure and confuse—gibberish.

The distillation of your extraordinary promise of value into a single marketing message that conveys the essence of your brand, and how you are distinct from your competition, is vitally important in our over-communicated, time pressed world. Brevity in your messaging is your best weapon in the race for top-of-mind status and market leadership. That is the thinking behind the Language of Luxury slogan: "Get Fluent. Get Affluent!"

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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Luxurry Real Estate Marketing: Are You Riding the Wave of Change?

The picture above was taken in our local neighborhood here in the Santa Barbara area. It tells an important story about our economy, but not necessarily the story you may have in mind. It is a manifestation of a mega-trend, a wave of change in the delivery and distribution of movies, a change that has been coming for over twenty years. As a luxury real estate marketing professional it is essential to anticipate trends in your local marketplace so that you are not caught off-guard. Positioning yourself or your company to ride the new waves can propel you to greater heights.

In the early 90’s, when we owned our commercial real estate firm in Beverly Hills, we worked with Blockbuster Video to open a neighborhood location. They were almost as aggressive in penetrating the market as Starbucks at the time, opening locations at breakneck speed. At the same time the internet was just taking off, but not yet in the mainstream.

The new light-weight media of DVDs that could be inexpensively mailed to customers and watched either on TV or on a computer, made it appear that Blockbuster’s brick and mortar days were limited. When Netflix introduced an online service offering movie suggestions based on personal preferences a superior customer experience was born. Plus, there was no late fee for tardy returns.

Today, you can rent movies from a kiosk in your local marketplace for $1 or you can purchase them via your cable or satellite TV provider without waiting for the mail. Meanwhile, with over 100 internet video on demand platforms, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad, Netflix has become a globally ubiquitous brand.

Consumers have now come to expect their movies on-demand as soon as they are released on DVD. Except for major “blockbuster” event movies, like the soon to be released two-part finale of Harry Potter, why pay more at a local theatre when you can enjoy it on your huge HD TV screen right in your living room or on a mobile devise if you are a road warrior.

Although, the movie industry has seen a modest increase in overall revenue this past year there has been a decline in actual movie attendance. It was the higher average price per ticket that caused the increase in revenue not the number of actual sales. Is the closing of a local theater a sign of a slow economy or is it a sign of the Titanic shift in the technology of delivering and distributing movies?

The most important question is this: Are you maximizing the use of video in your luxury real estate marketing practice? Are you taking advantage of this new media and riding this wave of change? Pay attention to trends. And, do not forget, there is always a new wave.

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Monday, September 20, 2010

Luxury Real Estate Marketing Tips: Emotional Branding-It's All About "Amore"- Love!

Marketing luxury real estate requires creating emotional rapport with your high net worth clients. The more your clients know that you understand their challenges, their interests and what they do to pursue happiness the quicker you can establish rapport and build trust. In fact, the speed of referrals is directly proportionate to the speed of trust that can be established through emotional branding.

Speed of referrals is also a factor of achieving top-of-mind status in a given category of business or a niche within your marketplace. When a buyer comes to town who is interested in purchasing a waterfront condo and they ask a stranger in town who is the best agent or company that specializes in handling this market segment, you want that stranger to think of you first. You want to “own” the term “waterfront condos” in the mind of your target market and also in the mind of anyone in your local marketplace, for that matter.

The process of getting your fans to ravie about you and also owning a market category or niche comes down to emotional branding strategy It is often easier to understand emotional branding strategy by studying how big companies go about doing it.

UPS, the 103 year old company that just recently went public, is planning their biggest advertising campaign ever. The goal: To own the word “logistics” in the minds of small to mid-size companies. UPS recognized that 70% of the companies in the US that sell products to foreign countries just ship to Canada because they are intimidated by the logistics of managing shipping , customs, returns and inventory control beyond our northern neighbors. UPS has been busy acquiring companies that can take the hassle out of logistics as an outsourced solution for a vast potential market. In the process they have developed a way to funnel more business to their core business, parcel delivery.

Their new marketing campaign, “We Love (with a Heart) Logistics” centers around clever lyrics to the song tune, That’s Amore! It is exciting to think that outsourcing these kinds of services can give small businesses a competitive advantage and also help increase exports from the USA to foreign countries to help our economy.

What emotional branding strategies are you developing and implementing to build rapport and achieve top-of-mind status as a luxury real estate marketing professional?

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