Marketing for Success

Make Your Properties Stand Out in the Crowd
By: Ed Keller, Professor, City College of New York

A Creative Director at a well-known advertising agency once told me that it’s really easy to create advertising for products that are superior to their competition: the real challenge, he said, is to create memorable advertising for the parity product--the one that may not have discernible superior attributes.

This raises critical issues for the real estate entrepreneur. To succeed depends on the ability to develop a marketing plan that, for all intents and purposes, is for a parity product—one much like the competition’s.

What makes one piece of real estate better than another? Isn’t it the result of the potential buyer’s perceptions? And isn’t perception a personal attribute? Of course: So the job of the real estate marketer is to employ principles that will set his product offerings apart from the competition.

On a day-to-day basis, your goal is to increase sales by selling, renting or leasing individual properties. But to succeed requires creating the perception through marketing that your properties are superior to the competition. And that emerges from the perception that you provide more than just a place to sleep and eat—that what you’re offering is status, an image, and a way of life.

That’s the big picture and the real task—and one on which Donald Trump has built his empire--the idea that when you buy a Trump property, you’re buying a superior way of life and, incidentally, making a secure investment, because the Trump brand has become associated with a superior product that will out-perform the marketplace in future appreciation.

Looked at this way, your marketing plan must be more than just a plan. It will affect your future, and needs to become a way of life. It needs to factor in all of the necessary variables, including the economic environment, the competition, pricing, and what people are really looking for when they buy real estate—their self-image.

To accomplish this, adopt the following strategies:

• Be flexible. Good marketing plans are based on educated guesses of what you predict will occur in the future. But that’s the future and, by definition, it may or may not happen. Therefore, be ready to make adjustments. The best marketing efforts are those that are adaptable to change.
  
  
• In many respects, your marketing plan is an extension of your corporate personality. It reflects how you wish to be perceived by your customers.

Often I hear people refer to marketing negatively. Avoid this trap. Don’t be a slick marketer, be a smart one.

How? Smart marketing is the result of the incremental things that you do, among which is the kind of service you provide. One of the things that will make your product offerings superior lies in the manner in which you deal with your customers, the way you present your product and your willingness to go the extra mile to make your customer feel special.

Doing these things is all part of the sale. And long term, isn’t that what makes a strong business?