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/RealEstate is a bi-weekly podcast where we chat with agents and experts in the real estate space to find out what strategies are working for them, what tools are powering their business, and how they are maneuvering shifts in the industry. Join host and marketing aficionado Chris Whitling as he uncovers the tips, tricks, and tech ambitious agents can use to take their businesses to the next level.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:22:17
Unknown
So I think really the best way to think about marketing writ large is that marketing is an exchange of value. It is navigating the exchange of value between company and consumer.
00:00:22:19 - 00:00:41:04
Unknown
Hello and welcome to Forward Slash Real Estate, the podcast for the technology enabled real estate agents. I say this every time, but I've got an episode for you guys that I am particularly excited about. We're going to be talking to Matt Johnson, and I'm going to let him just give the introduction on, what we're going to do here.
00:00:41:04 - 00:01:04:00
Unknown
But this is going to be a lot of like marketing 101, exactly how you need to think about marketing, branding, the perception of all of this stuff in your clients minds. This is the episode that you're going to want to watch or listen to several times, as you're planning out all the automated emails that you're going to end up writing using whatever marketing automation system you end up using.
00:01:04:01 - 00:01:28:03
Unknown
I'm your host, Chris, and let's just get started. So, Matt, can you give us a quick bio on who you are? Thanks so much for having me, Chris. Yeah. So my name is Doctor Matt Johnson. I am a, professor of marketing and consumer psychology at Holt International Business School. I originally come from the world of academic neuroscience, so my, PFC work actually focused on something totally different than marketing.
00:01:28:03 - 00:01:53:05
Unknown
I focused on the neuroscience of perception and communication. So effectively, how we take in the raw, sensory details of the environment, the sights and sounds, the haptic sensations, how we interpret these, how we build these rich inner worlds that effectively only we can experience. Right. Consciousness is, is a private internal experience. And then ultimately, how do we share these ideas and concepts in the social environment?
00:01:53:07 - 00:02:21:05
Unknown
So following my, PhD studies, my my work and my research, my writing is really focused on applying this perspective to marketing and branding. So really helping marketing teams up brands harness insights from these fields. I was an expert at residence, with Nike. I've worked with Shopify, I've worked with a few real estate brands. I've worked with, a lot of, sort of direct to consumer, specializing in B2C companies, a couple of books in this area as well.
00:02:21:05 - 00:02:46:08
Unknown
So blindsight came out in 2020 and then, brand that means business with The Economist in 2022. That's so good. And we're going to have all the links to your books and blogs down below, so you guys can scroll down right now and open up your extra tabs. Because this is going to be good stuff. I like I said, I super excited for this conversation because, you know, as a marketing guy, these were the these were the classes that I love to coach.
00:02:46:10 - 00:03:07:18
Unknown
So, yeah. Okay. So you threw out a lot there. And it's safe to say that you're probably the most credentialed person we've ever had on the show. So let's just start digging in and, you know, maybe it was like a really light, simple question, like, what is marketing? Yeah. So it's, it's a funny question, right?
00:03:07:18 - 00:03:33:05
Unknown
Because you're in a room full of, I don't know, a thousand marketers, and you ask, what is marketing? And you're going to get 999, 998, maybe different responses. It's one of those things that we all understand pretty intuitively, but really coming to a, sort of a concrete definition is, is is a bit challenging. And so I think really the best way to think about marketing writ large is that marketing is an exchange of value.
00:03:33:07 - 00:03:56:06
Unknown
It is navigating the exchange of value between company and consumer, right? That at a business level like you as a company, have to have something of value to someone at some point, right? If you have nothing that you can send out to the marketplace, it's going to be a valuable to someone at some point in some way. Like you have no chance of becoming a solvent business.
00:03:56:06 - 00:04:19:23
Unknown
Right. And so really, the the art and science and practice of marketing is the navigation of this exchange of value. You're sending something out into the marketplace that you hope and you pray and you cultivate and you sculpt into something valuable. And it has to be perceived as valuable by your customers, by a target market. Right. You don't have to be all things to all people.
00:04:20:00 - 00:04:39:21
Unknown
But you do have to be perceived or your products or your offerings do not be perceived as valuable by someone. Right. So for thinking about defining marketing, you know, broadly speaking, it really is the navigation of an exchange of value between company and customers in a way that's that's ideally beneficial for the company, right, as you're trying to navigate it to your advantage.
00:04:39:21 - 00:05:03:08
Unknown
If we're getting into what is ethical marketing, I would argue that it's a navigation of this exchange of value in a way that's not just beneficial to the company, but also is is mutually beneficial to your customers. If we're going to get into what's corporate responsibility, we're kind of adding another line there. So not just beneficial to the company, not just customers, but the broader good, whether that's the environment, whether that's, sort of aspirational ideals of, of equality.
00:05:03:10 - 00:05:21:09
Unknown
But that would be kind of how we get into sort of corporate responsibility as well. One thing you made me think of is, that movie Field of Dreams, which I think might not lead the witness here, but like, in my personal opinion, is like the most damaging, movie ever created in the world of marketing.
00:05:21:11 - 00:05:40:10
Unknown
Because the tagline in that the ghosts were saying or whatever was like, build it and they will come. Which is like, if you create a product, it doesn't automatically mean that they're gonna come. There's a lot of steps in between here and there. Absolutely. It's funny you mentioned Field of Dreams. I was just early today watching this clip.
00:05:40:10 - 00:05:53:20
Unknown
I don't know if you're familiar. There's the show called Peep Show, which is this kind of a little bit esoteric British show, but one of the characters opens up a bar and just clearly has no idea what they're doing. The other character is a little bit more intelligent, says, well, what's your what's your plan? What's your market research?
00:05:53:20 - 00:06:23:23
Unknown
And he's like, Margery, search. If you build it, they will come, right? It's like your market research is Field of Dreams and it's yeah, speaks to this exact point. Right. But I do think there's some exceptions there for sure. I think really what what that what that impinges on is this broader concept of, of market orientation. Right. So so typically what happens is you know, your brand, your company and, and part of the development of, of your growth into a company with a unique brand and a new product is you're identifying unmet needs in the marketplace.
00:06:23:23 - 00:06:50:14
Unknown
You're understanding those needs or understanding you need customer preferences. You are collecting that data from your market. You're assimilated and back into your brand, and then you are delivering that back to consumer, right? You are being, market driven, finding what consumers want of what consumers need, delivering that back to them in your own creative way and ideally, a way that exceeds their expectations beyond what that that was possible for that category.
00:06:50:14 - 00:07:12:11
Unknown
Right. So that's that's kind of a traditional business. But there is an exception there. Right? If you think of, there's another category of kind of market driving brands. Right. So if you think of for example, luxury brands, so it's kind of crazy. But they do follow, you know pretty closely that the Field of Dreams model, right? They historically, traditionally do not do any market research at all.
00:07:12:11 - 00:07:38:23
Unknown
If you're a virgin or you're a Marc Jacobs, you don't do market research. Right? Because you are a creative, you are innovative. You have your own ideas about what cool should be or what fashion should be, or what the design of a supercar should be. And you don't ask consumers what they want. You have this, kind of ideal that that's separate from your market, and you tell them what's cool, right?
00:07:38:23 - 00:08:11:03
Unknown
You're not a chase, a taste chaser. You're a tastemaker, and you drive demand. And that's that's typically associated with, luxury brands, luxury fashion in particular. But it's not exclusive. Right. So you could point to Apple, you could point to, Bose, you could point to, bang. And all of sudden, there's certain technology companies that that by virtue of their, their innovation and their creativity and their ingenuity are able to drive that demand instead of trying to gather those market research insights and then delivering it back to their consumers.
00:08:11:07 - 00:08:37:13
Unknown
Yeah, okay. So this is going to pick up on something I want to ask you about later. I want to I want to take a stop before we get there because it does seem like there's, you know, always this chicken and the egg question of, have I identified a market demand? Because I was just prescient. Or did I do a bunch of research on my existing clients to find out why I resonate so well with them and then, like, drive that home?
00:08:37:15 - 00:09:02:06
Unknown
But first, I think it's probably good to start thinking about, like, what even is a brand? Yeah, yeah. So if we're going back to the definition of marketing, right. So marketing is a navigation of the exchange evaluating company and customers. The brand is a a tool of the company which enables it to navigate that dynamic and navigate that relationship effectively and to its advantage.
00:09:02:08 - 00:09:25:04
Unknown
Right. So this is this is goes back to what we spoke about in 1000. What where you know, for defining what a brand is. On the one hand it is very corporate. It is a tool of the company, that enables it to, to navigate this exchange of value. It adds unique benefits in terms of differentiating it from unique, from, from competitors in the marketplace, adding unique value above and beyond the product itself.
00:09:25:06 - 00:09:45:07
Unknown
And as well identifying the company's offerings. So if you go into a a Foot Locker, right, there's there's Asics, there's Nike's, there's Adidas, there's Under Armor. You don't have to like look under the tongue of of each of those. This is manufactured by Adidas manufactured by Under Armor. You can see that unique brand iconography and that identifies the offerings.
00:09:45:07 - 00:10:12:16
Unknown
Right. So a brand is in the service of the company. The brand is not the company, but it really helps the company navigate this exchange of value effectively. Is the brand. You said it's a tool for the company, but where does the brand live? Is that in the consumer's head or is that something in a in a document that lives in a locked ball in, you know, Nike's HQ, like where where is the brand?
00:10:12:17 - 00:10:41:19
Unknown
Totally. So that the brand, you know, certainly from a perspective does have some, some, some, some instantiations that are corporate level. Right. So there's a lot of IP. Those are brand associations, brand reference. And the company will will defend those legally. But really if we're talking about the actual impact the brand has and its ability to exert that influence and have those advantages, we're really talking about how the brand is able to instantiate these associations into the mind of the market.
00:10:41:21 - 00:11:00:09
Unknown
So if we're looking at this from the other side of the coin, the brand really exists nowhere else but in the mind of the consumer. Right? So every one of us, if you ask them about a global brand, whether it's Volkswagen or Nike or Kit-Kat or Mars Bar, right, they're going to have a certain set of associations that come up.
00:11:00:11 - 00:11:24:15
Unknown
And if we're to aggregate those idiosyncratic associations that any given customer has over the total addressable market, that's what we would call the brand image. And insofar as the brand is consistent and they have a sort of a common identity and a common way in which they appear in the marketplace, those associations that people develop are going to be roughly consistent.
00:11:24:15 - 00:11:45:20
Unknown
They're going to be roughly, the same across individuals. So if you ask people, all right, give me three adjectives you associate with Volkswagen. Most people are going to say, you know, German value car beetle, something like that. There's going to be a few, you know, at the margins that would think of Volkswagen as being, you know, luxurious or fast or speedy or something.
00:11:45:20 - 00:12:09:15
Unknown
But, you know, brands are kind of living dynamic things. They're concepts that are vague and ambiguous and do admit to individual interpretation. Everyone has their own kind of unique associations that build in their minds, but generally speaking, the brand image is kind of the aggregation of all of these idiosyncratic, unique associations. And that ultimately is what gives the brand its power to be able to serve as an asset for the company.
00:12:09:15 - 00:12:39:03
Unknown
If the brand if the company is not instantiating these connections, essentially it has no ability to have any power in the marketplace. Okay. So and I think maybe it's first of all, like we just were talking about like high level like big international brands. But I think this works also, you know, at an individual level. So if you're a real estate agent that focuses on like one neighborhood inside Austin, like, is it fair to say that like your brand maybe to simplify all this, your brand is what your clients say about you.
00:12:39:05 - 00:13:01:05
Unknown
Like if if they someone else at the thousand Watts said something that was really good, I like that was like, you know, would you ask your clients to describe your brand like, that's what your brand is? Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you can you can, you know, have other conversations about, you know, kind of the internal representation of the brand and, and what it means in terms of your internalized constitution and your IP.
00:13:01:07 - 00:13:21:05
Unknown
But really, if, if none of that is translated in a reflective way into the mind of the market or is reflected totally differently, it's such that it doesn't even resemble what you have in mind for it, then ultimately it you know, it is not is not working. So yeah, I think the true test of a brand and really its power, its potency is how it instantiates those connections.
00:13:21:05 - 00:13:44:08
Unknown
And it is what, your customers and your key stakeholders are really saying and feeling about the brand. Absolutely. Meet move to your leads. New favorite way to search for homes. The move to AB is the ultimate mobile companion to your real geeks website. Sleek, fast, and insanely easy to use move to turns home, searching into an experience your leads will want to come back to again and again.
00:13:44:10 - 00:14:08:19
Unknown
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00:14:08:21 - 00:14:32:07
Unknown
If it's searchable on your site, it's instantly at their fingertips on move to move to mobile search made smarter for your leads and your business. So I listen to this and, you know, I've heard, there's a book which I'll leave in the comments. Like, what it was, but I think they described a brand is like kind of a container for the way that someone feels about like your company or you or what you do.
00:14:32:09 - 00:14:54:12
Unknown
But you know, maybe this is where you can get on a little bit of, like, the neuroscience, like, is this, you know, is this like logic in differentiation or is this like feelings and emotions and memories? And you've used the term association a lot like so maybe we can dig into a little bit about like what's actually happening inside people's heads when they're like building these brand images.
00:14:54:12 - 00:15:14:21
Unknown
Totally. So yeah, I do think there's a lot of different important components there. So associations I would say is, is broad and that's, that's I think neutral with respect to the the emotional salience of that. Say, think of, you know, Volkswagen, there are going to be some very just like purely semantic things like German engineering that doesn't really have an emotional tone to it.
00:15:14:21 - 00:15:39:01
Unknown
But if you kind of probe a little bit deeper, especially to a fan of that brand, for example, you're going to get to more emotional, you know, words, right? Or a sentiment that we could only articulate via linguistic means. Right. So you say Volkswagen and you know, you're going to get a feeling sense internally about it. Maybe you have strong, fond memories of the reliability of the vehicle or, you know, it makes you laugh.
00:15:39:01 - 00:16:01:13
Unknown
Thinking back to some of the previous advertisements. And then if you're asking people to articulate those, you know, we only have so many tools to articulate things. It's going to come out linguistically and you're describing it in words. But those are really, you know, emotionally laden terminology. But I think if we get into really what the, the potency of a brand is about, of course, the specific semantics are important.
00:16:01:15 - 00:16:31:12
Unknown
But they're important ultimately because they do connote a emotional feeling. Right? So being associated with, you know, Germany and German engineering isn't just a fact about it. It's not merely a fact. It's also connotes, you know, a deeper sense of of maybe trust and reliability and diligence and precision and all things that we maybe associate with kind of, you know, German ideals of, of automation and machinery and production, you know, and that's what really makes a difference.
00:16:31:12 - 00:16:50:05
Unknown
So if I think we, we kind of peel back a layer on any of the semantic associations, what we really get is this deeper emotional sentience and that's ultimately, I think, what's really driving a lot of consumer sentiment and ultimately moves people in terms of, you know, being a fan of one brand versus another this kind of way.
00:16:50:05 - 00:17:14:08
Unknown
You know, it's the term storytelling and marketing has become really popular, you know, over the last couple of years. But it it seems like, you know, sometimes I feel like, you know, humans don't actually remember any, you know, sort of like logical fact things like, like we are not actually like super logical beings where we're like sort of emotionally driven story machines.
00:17:14:10 - 00:17:33:23
Unknown
Is is that a right assumption or. Oh, like way off here? 100%. It's true on on many levels. So one, there's a ton of psychological research showing exactly that. Right? If you give somebody, you know, a story and then you have them read it, or maybe try to memorize it and you ask them two weeks later, you know, tell me about this detail.
00:17:34:01 - 00:17:48:18
Unknown
They're going to be pretty bad at it. Right? But if you tell oh, well, tell me the gist of what happened, they remember the storyline. There's also experiments showing that if you string a bunch of facts together, it kind of random order, you know, people aren't able to remember them. It doesn't really have an impact on the behavior.
00:17:48:18 - 00:18:13:06
Unknown
But if you string those facts together in a coherent story where there's an arc and maybe there's characters and you feel emotionally invested, you actually won. The story influences your your behavior more. But to you also remember these elements as well. So I think it's true that we're storytelling beings in a, in a psychological sense. I also think it's it's very true, in terms of what actually, moves marketing.
00:18:13:06 - 00:18:34:10
Unknown
So it's actually a great experiment that was done very recently by Les Bernie. Where they looked across there was something like, you know, 2500 different advertisements, and they had independent ratings of these advertisements in terms of kind of how much they appealed to our kind of rationality and our logic. And also how much they kind of appealed to more of an emotional claim.
00:18:34:12 - 00:18:55:14
Unknown
And what they expected to find was that, oh, you know, we're, you know, humans are complex. And, you know, we have the rational side. We have the emotional side. Kind of a very nice story to tell about how there's this, you know, kind of duality to, to consumer behavior. But what they found was that overwhelmingly, what ended up making the biggest difference was almost never in any instance, any rational claim.
00:18:55:16 - 00:19:20:15
Unknown
It was almost always in every single product category about the emotion. And so not only does storytelling move us all, it is the storytelling kind of how we organize ideas naturally, but also if that storytelling is connected with, kind of emotional, resonance, that's ultimately what makes the biggest difference above and beyond the rational, the logic and, and advertising and marketing sense.
00:19:20:17 - 00:19:59:03
Unknown
So this is like it's a fact that might be, you know, if we take this back to real estate, you know, like, I helped you save more by my powers negotiation versus a story that's like my clients live super happy lives with their families in the houses that I helped them acquire 100%, 100%. Yeah. So I think really the most important thing, and I would argue almost the only important thing is, is how you make the consumer feel everything else is secondary to that, and everything else is is in support of that.
00:19:59:08 - 00:20:23:21
Unknown
Right. So you can imagine, you know, whatever claim you're going to make to the consumer. We saved you X amount of money. We, we, you know, gave you all these different options, you know, whatever you want to describe it in terms of, of just a descriptive account of what happened. If that account is totally independent or totally devoid of of kind of an emotional level, it ceases to make any sort of difference.
00:20:24:00 - 00:20:41:10
Unknown
And if it only makes if it makes a difference, it does so because people in their own heads associate that with an emotional impact. Right? You think, oh, well, they saved me a bunch of money. I feel good about that. I have more expendable income. I feel less stressed about my financial situation. There's an emotional, association that consumers making.
00:20:41:10 - 00:21:11:00
Unknown
And so I think, what a lot of marketing could do better and what a lot of marketing maybe should strive to do more is, is making that emotional connection more explicit, right? Don't make consumers make those connections on their own. Don't expect that they actually do that, you know, make the kind of emotional connection upfront. And of course, this is where we get into storytelling, because a lot of advertising, a lot of marketing doesn't work on an explicit level that works on an implicit, nice, nuanced kind of storytelling level.
00:21:11:05 - 00:21:36:12
Unknown
If you tell consumers, hey, feel relieved, feel happy, feel joyous, feel less stressed, you know, that's not really how emotions work, right? You get to be in this more implicit, liminal mode of of storytelling and nuance. And that's where really the creative execution comes in. Yeah, we need to come back to that. You know, when you're talking through a lot about, you know, I'm kind of thinking through like a lot of the perfume or Cologne, you know, type ads that are like pure vibes.
00:21:36:14 - 00:22:03:17
Unknown
Yeah, totally. You know, and they're, they're marketing a product that they're expecting a premium for that, you know, I mean, they can't tell you how it smells, and that would probably be counterproductive. You know, or the other brand that really comes to mind as you talk through that is like BMW. How they really try and focus on this is the way that you're going to feel driving our vehicle, where I think some of their competitors don't, don't capture that quite the same way.
00:22:03:17 - 00:22:23:03
Unknown
Their brand has been very focused on that. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so let's say that your, your an agent that's been at it for a while and, you know, I'll, I'll give you a common story that we hear every so often. Right. And it's like, okay. So I've been at this for insert number of years here, like let's say 15, right.
00:22:23:04 - 00:22:40:00
Unknown
And I find that I end up working with a certain profile of client. Right. And I know that like this certain profile client, when they come across my desk like this is this is going to be really good. So I think you and I as marketers would probably say, okay, so it does seem like you have a brand there.
00:22:40:00 - 00:23:14:18
Unknown
You have an ideal client, and you would probably like to find more of those people. So we've got to figure out how like like what it is, that that is driving those people, you know, to you. Right. Or what you can say to another client that's going to evoke those same sort of feelings. So how do you how do you start to drill into, like, what your brand actually means in the mind of like, the people that you sort of successfully got thinking the right way?
00:23:15:00 - 00:23:31:03
Unknown
Yeah. So I think this is, is really where we get to the core of, of marketing strategy. Right. So I think that the kind of the core of marketing strategy, is really these two components, right, where you have the, the what in the who. So marketing strategy is really what do you do better than anybody else?
00:23:31:03 - 00:23:54:15
Unknown
And who do you do it for? Right. So you have you're kind of in corny MBA speak, right? You have your unique value proposition and then you have your target market. And it's important, I think, in, in kind of the early throes of, of market research to, you know, do your diligence such that your, your target market, if you're able to get a value proposition that resonates, is is sufficiently large that it it would support a business.
00:23:54:15 - 00:24:12:23
Unknown
Right. So if your target market is is too narrowly constrained, like we're going to make a product for, you know, Iowa based postal workers like that's, you know, unless you have a very niche business, which is great. It's not maybe the kind of business that's going to be solvent and your total addressable market might just be too small.
00:24:13:01 - 00:24:29:13
Unknown
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I think it is a good idea to have, that do the market reach into the diligence such that your target market can be narrowly defined, and you do have a value proposition that that speaks to them directly in a distinct way, in the way that that no, no, no other competitor is or arguably can.
00:24:29:13 - 00:24:48:15
Unknown
Right. So you want to have some kind of moats or some sort of ways in which you can, can test consistently execute on this in a way that's that's differentiated and proprietary. And that is, well, there's at least a, a target market that's sufficiently large. And that also is is slightly nebulous, right. Because all of this is probabilistic, right?
00:24:48:15 - 00:25:10:00
Unknown
We're not saying that we have a target market. And that's 100% of our customers. And we're for 100% of them and 0% of, of anybody else. Because markets are messy and these are distributions, these are probabilities. And we want to have a, an appeal that, that that's targeted. And and we know we're going to resonate with you.
00:25:10:01 - 00:25:41:22
Unknown
We're kind of placing our chips essentially and saying, you know, my my marketing budget, my value proposition, my aims are more likely to resonate with this target market than with other people. So therefore my my marketing efforts are going there, but you should do so in a way where it doesn't, you know, rule out or doesn't excludes, you know, other people as well and other other markets because they're, you know, and especially very early on in the business, you know, we don't exactly know how a given brand or value proposition or unique elements of a product are going to resonate.
00:25:41:22 - 00:25:59:22
Unknown
And so if you come out too early and make you know, that line in the sand saying, we're for these people, not for others, that may be very premature because it could very well be, you know, for other people as well. And typically speaking, as a brand kind of grows and they establish this all important milestone of having that product market fit.
00:26:00:00 - 00:26:21:13
Unknown
Their brand does become, kind of a bit more abstract and a bit more all encompassing. If you look at brand like Amazon is is one of the ultimate examples, right? So Amazon, you know, they obviously have e-commerce. But they've got, you know, movies and streaming and they've got Amazon Web Services and they got Amazon fulfillment services and they've got all sorts of things.
00:26:21:15 - 00:26:47:22
Unknown
And so the Amazon brand, I think, still represents something meaningful, but it represents something meaningful in terms of being efficient and being friendly and having, you know, flexibility and being customer centric. Those are all, you know, relatively abstract concepts that would appeal to all these different verticals and as well a very wide demographic and a very wide target market slash target markets.
00:26:48:00 - 00:27:13:08
Unknown
We could probably spend months, talking about, you know, a international brand like Amazon or, you know, a large company like Walmart, you know, and like, do they have focused brands that like, speak to narrow audiences, or is it better to have this, you know, all encompassing, all appealing, you know, tight, tight brand, you know, and I and I think that, you know, bring this back to real estate.
00:27:13:08 - 00:27:35:15
Unknown
That's something that, you know, we care. We hear people in the industry talking about, which is like, you know, they don't ever want to say no to a deal that's coming across their desk. And I don't think that's what we're saying here, but I think we're saying, like, ultimately you're going to want to have messaging that communicates who the best clients for you are and how you're different from everyone else.
00:27:35:15 - 00:27:54:20
Unknown
So maybe, like just to touch on this one other piece with that, I heard you say there, which is a brand should ideally attract but not repel. Yeah. That's one way I've heard it heard said. And maybe we can just drill into this, a little bit more. But, you know, you don't want to say necessarily, like, I don't want to work with this type of person.
00:27:55:01 - 00:28:19:22
Unknown
You want to say like these, this is who we're going to benefit most, right? Because again, it's like there's a, a, you know, distribution of of people that, you know, that you work with is like, there's no such thing as the average person. Right? Totally. Totally. Yeah. No, I think that that's that's one thing that kind of gets lost in a lot of the market research is you do.
00:28:19:22 - 00:28:41:13
Unknown
And that's kind of the art and science of, of developing a customer persona is it is kind of the aggregation of your target market, right. If you could average all of this incredible human diversity down to a single person, that you could therefore have a conversation with and understand qualitatively, and therefore really understand how to serve their needs and how to market to them like that.
00:28:41:13 - 00:29:04:18
Unknown
That's number one. Great. But number two, like you need to realize that that's a simulacrum and not a reflection of, of of any sort of fact. Right. That's, that's a tool. That's a methodology. But but, you know, we're really dealing with, you know, incredible amount of diversity of, of individuals. And we really can't have that as, as to, to tethered to that concept.
00:29:04:19 - 00:29:28:15
Unknown
But I love what you mentioned before about you want to attract your, your, you know, ideal customer, as opposed to, with an emphasis on, on kind of not repelling, you know, the people that aren't, you know, necessarily in that idealized group. But I think that's that's really crucial. And I think, you know, one thing that comes to mind, especially for real estate, is, you know, people go through different phases in their lives, right?
00:29:28:15 - 00:29:53:06
Unknown
And and people also go through different contextual shifts, especially when, you know, socio economic circumstances may shift. Right. And that may change how they view themselves. That may change how they view their, their aspirational self. And even within the same day or the same week, even if our circumstances stay the same, you know, we still are maybe different when we're at work versus when we're different at home versus when we're with family.
00:29:53:08 - 00:30:27:20
Unknown
And so you want to be able to appeal to, to different aspects of even the same individual person. Right. So you could imagine a real estate company that's maybe a bit more high end on like more expensive coastal properties. And, you know, I think you do want to position yourself where you're very clearly have a target market in mind, and you very clearly are attracting the right people, but you don't want to come across as offputting for, you know, somebody who who aspirationally kind of sees themselves there in one, 2 or 3 years and they're working hard so they can afford one of these properties that I going to contact you when they reach
00:30:27:20 - 00:30:49:12
Unknown
this milestone. Like there's no and there's just no reason for it. It's just totally unnecessary. So I think that it's a fine art, right? I think that's again where creative execution comes from in terms of web design, in terms of copyediting, in terms of of the tone frequency of emails, etc., of of how you apply that really light touch where you're clearly for something of a clear identity.
00:30:49:17 - 00:30:59:01
Unknown
There's conviction there, and you're also doing it in a way where you're not repelling, you know, you're you're not ideal customer.
00:30:59:03 - 00:31:21:12
Unknown
So one thing I've been I've been curious, you know, about and I think is going to get asked is, you know, we have we have agents that have been around forever. You know, that I think could and I want to give them a guide to, you know, doing the drill down exercise on like, how they get to sort of the deep emotional connections that that are going to like, really make their messaging resonate.
00:31:21:14 - 00:31:52:03
Unknown
But there's probably like a chicken and egg question that a lot of people are asking right now, which is like, so do I have to do all this exercise before I start? Or do I run my business for a while and then do an inventory of who I am, you know, having a lot of success with and then drilling to like, trigger the egg like, you know, I've got all this market strategy, market research like whatever, you know, do I do I try and have like the fully built thesis at the beginning or do I do this like later?
00:31:52:03 - 00:31:56:23
Unknown
Dot layer on down my life cycle.