My friend and esteemed colleague Richard Riccelli called tonight to talk about the custom yard signs — among many hundreds of millions of other things.
I’ve known Richard since the day I found out that my son Cameron was certifiably enwombed — fifteen and a half years ago (wow!). When the boy was born, Richard was the first person to call him “Cam” — and then right away “Cambo.” I can picture both of those events — meeting him and his applying diminutives to my son — just like they were yesterday.
This is not happenstance: Richard Riccelli makes an impression. He walks, talks and — especially — thinks at a blistering pace. He throws off ideas the way the rest of us shed skin cells, dozens a minute. When he is focused, he is so much like a laser that you expect his eyes to burn through paper — through tables, walls, concrete. When he lets his mind float freely, he can glance pinball-like across a universe full of wonders in the span of a moment. At the end of a Richard Riccelli soliloquy, you will be left gasping, but you will have grasped a perfect metaphor, a unique and elegant way of uniting that universe full of wonders in a way you had never thought of before.
Richard Riccelli is our personal marketing god. He has been advising us since we began this business — not formally, but again and again with the perfect idea at the perfect moment. He is the reason that our logo looks the way it does — and why the dog in the logo smiles. He has been along for each of the three versions of our signs — along with many other marketing decisions, large and small. We don’t always do what he says to do, but we think very carefully about everything he says.
Which isn’t easy, given how many stunningly original ideas he can cram into a single sentence! In tonight’s call we agreed that custom real estate signs are essentially direct marketing, inherently testable — and Richard has no use for marketing that is not testable. What we’ll do is play with different looks on the signs to see if any particular way of putting things together seems to pull substantially better than the others.
From there, he took me through the marginal added value of marketing, more perfectly matching marketing efforts to rewards, a half-a-dozen different real estate business models, an encyclopedic encapsulation of the magazine industry, the profit potential of the seminar market, et infinitely cetera.
He remarked on something I had said as an aside, something that had also occurred to him a few months ago, that Zillow.com, despite its inherent defects, may become the de facto price standard of residential real estate. Interestingly, he said real estate agents in Boston are showing up to listing appointments with Zestimates for comps. The point is not pricing, so much, as proving how “hi-tech” they are.
Oh. Great.
Richard’s take: Market it. If Zillow does become the standard of home evaluation, your home will never be worth more than its P.Z. (pre-Zillow) price, so sell now!
There was more, more, more, and it will take me days to unpack it all. Richard is planning a weblog, but he’s waiting for the world to become completely ravenous for the feasts he brings. For now, we gorge ourselves as we can, enriched in every possible way by an abundance we can never hope to pay back.
Money, work, business. Family, friends, home. Art, leisure, fun. I don’t like things that are artificially separated. I like for everything to be all one thing. The most fun I have is when I’m working, and that strikes me as normal — the way things should be for a thriving human being. Richard Riccelli is an exponent of my world. Of all the gifts of mind he has so casually, so generously thrown my way, the greatest of them all is simply his having been who he is: Vibrant, mercurial, pungent and derisive and uproarious, spontaneous, pellucid — unrepeatable…
I’m very proud to be his friend.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Teri L says:
>What we’ll do is play with different looks on the signs to see if any particular way of putting things together seems to pull substantially better than the others.
All custom signs are not created equal. Some, I presume don’t stop traffic, or stop it for the wrong reasons. Are you (ever) done testing layouts?
October 3, 2008 — 6:35 am
Greg Swann says:
> Are you (ever) done testing layouts?
We haven’t even started, alas. I’ve been using the same basic design for more than two years. Richard came up with some design concepts earlier this year, but we haven’t played with any of them yet. The sign is always made on a crush deadline, but we do need to see if other configurations can work better.
I think Richard would argue that you’re never done testing anything. As soon as you get to something that kills, you should be looking for the idea that totally slays it.
October 3, 2008 — 7:44 am