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Author: Bill Leider (page 1 of 1)

CEO of Real Estate Shows

December 14, 2007

What Is A Brand?

by

CEO of Real Estate Shows

Author website

Yesterday morning I read the lead article in RISMEDIA’s enews entitled: “Nine Things Consumers Won’t Care About in the New Year.” The list was developed by Jimmy Vee and Travis Miller, two “marketing experts” who blah blah blah.

Item 7 on the list of things consumers won’t care about was: “Your Brand. They only care that the experience of doing business with you is sensational.”

Are they kidding? Did they really mean that? If so, they hit the nail on the head regarding one monumental marketing misconception: that Brand means Name Recognition. Name recognition is only one part of your Brand. It’s the foot in the door part. It’s the part that matters most if you only want to do business with someone once. Thinking that name recognition is your Brand is like thinking that you are your makeup, or the car you drive. Those things might impress but they don’t define. Unless, of course, you live in L.A.

Name recognition is the part of your Brand that the ad agencies love most because name awareness campaigns are easy to sell (for lots of money), hard to connect to your bottom line results and thereby make the agencies unaccountable for tangible results. For ad agencies, it’s a gig made in heaven.

Here’s a fact. The kind of experience people have in doing business with you IS an integral piece of your Brand. To believe that your Brand is about name recognition alone is a costly and dangerous misstep. It could cause you to spend lots of money, tons of time and get no return on your investment.

If we define Brand solely as the strength of your name, consider some people and entities with great name recognition: Osama bin Laden; Enron; O.J. Simpson; Blackwater. Would you want the expectation of the experience of dealing with them as the motivator for doing business with you?

I believe your Brand is a widely held set of beliefs and expectations about what you deliver and how you deliver it. That applies whether you’re an individual or a multi-national organization. Your Brand is strengthened or weakened by every person in Read more

November 20, 2007

Transparency – Too Much Is Too Much

by

CEO of Real Estate Shows

Author website

Where is it written that video is the only media capable of telling the unvarnished truth?

To listen to the techie-babblers, video has arrived to save us all from the seductive slime of deceptive sales presentations. Video, they argue, is the best and by some accounts the only way to present a home in sufficient detail to show viewers the flaws along with the features. Video can give a viewer sooo much information that the viewer can say, “Wow, I’ve learned so much about that home that I’m no longer interested in it. I don’t need or want to see it. Thank you, thank you, thank you for saving me all that time.” And because video can do that, it must do that. It’s a sacred calling. All hail.

Not so fast.

In their zealous rush to saviordom, the video geeks have conveniently ignored most of the spectrum of human behavior: the role of emotions in decision making; the normal process of how people want and need to connect, be attracted to, interact and form relationships with other people and with significant possessions (like homes).

In the TB (techie-babbler) world, information (visual, audio, written, whatever) is all that matters. Context means nothing. Holistic models and processes are rubbish. Emotions are to be ignored or suppressed. And some genius found the perfect gift-wrapping to convey this TB notion to the world in one magic word – transparency. God I wish I’d thought of that.

I don’t categorically favor any one medium over all others. They all have their place and time. I’m for competence. I’m against ineptitude. Good still photography used in a compelling presentation is far better than a mediocre video or virtual tour. Well-written, evocative titles and descriptive content beats bad voice-overs. And all media are equally capable of delivering transparency. It’s up to the creators.

Transparency for the sake of transparency, without regard to the setting and purpose of the message, without giving consideration to how people want and need to be communicated with and without taking into account where you are in the relationship and how it will continue to develop – is Read more

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