Category: Portland marketing

A New Wrinkle in Real Estate Marketing

Coffee shop employees sometimes “salt the tip jar” — putting a dollar or two in an empty jar to influence customer behavior. Now, some in the real estate industry are borrowing the idea and implementing it on a much larger scale.

Home staging companies have been around forever — real estate companies hire them to make vacant houses look lived-in. But until recently, most of the houses weren’t actually occupied.

That’s changing. The Wall Street Journal reports on companies that provide “faux homeowners” — people who actually move in. The idea is not completely new (some businesses did this during the California slump of the early 90’s), but it’s become a lot more prevalent. These companies

…fill high-end empty houses with occupants who play the part of happy homeowners, in a bid to remove the price-depressing stigma of vacancy…Temporary occupants bring their own furnishings and insurance to empty houses, and maintain the home, lawn and pool. They pay utilities and a monthly fee well below market rent. “They are not tenants, because they are instrumental in marketing the property,” says Ms. Heineke [Mary Heinke, owner of Quality First Home Marketing]. And besides, “a tenant isn’t seen as an asset.”…

Showhomes Management LLC, a franchise operation based in Nashville, has 350 “resident managers” living in homes for sale in 46 high-end markets, including in Florida, Arizona and Illinois. The company has seen revenues increase 88% since last year, says vice president Thomas Scott. Unoccupied staged houses aren’t selling as well as those with people in them, he says, “because people can still tell they’re vacant.”

During the boom years, many homeowners just put a for-sale sign on the lawn, and let buyers compete with each other.  Even if the home was in poor repair, buyers would use their imaginations as to what the house could be — and make an offer.

Now, it’s up to the seller to fill in the picture.

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Two Or Three Words

Reading Scott Ginsberg’s How to Be That Guy this evening, I happened upon this gem:

PICTURE THIS: you’re sitting in the CNN Green Room, ready to be interviewed about your cool new idea, company, or product. After giving the producer the correct spelling of your full name, she asks you, “Oh, and one last thing before you go on the air in five minutes: what two or three words do you want written underneath your name?”

It’s a valuable reality check — you might have a multi-page web site or brochure. You might have a complex and sophisticated multiple-media campaign going. But when one of your customers mentions you to a friend, relative, or co-worker, the description may only be a few words.

So this could be a valuable exercise in boiling your selling proposition down to its essence — try to describe the value you provide in three words or less.

I’m Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert.

Who are you?

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page here

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert, at 503-323-6553.

A New Press Release Tool Treats The Symptom…

… but perhaps not the underlying problem.

My friend Rita Radostitz recently sent me an article from David Henderson’s blog. Henderson, a PR consultant and former CBS News correspondent, writes about David Meerman Scott’s new Gobbledygook Grader. The Gobbledygook Grader is an online tool designed to ferret out “gobbledygook, jargon, cliches and over-used, hype-filled words.”

Copy your press release, paste it into the Grader, and Scott will email you a report and a grade.

Helpful, says Henderson, but it may miss the point:

…press releases are generally not focused on providing legitimate news but rather are infused with meaningless promotional hype that few people care about. Press releases are today less about giving the media something to report and more about promoting something. Today’s press releases have become sales flyers.

If your company has news of genuine interest, and you want it covered, Henderson has some good suggestions in the last paragraph of his post. Read the full post here.

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Click here to learn the shocking truth about Phil Bernstein

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

New Era Makes a Marketing Challenge Go Away… Almost

The Sunday New York Times has a look at American Idol contestant Adam Lambert. Lambert is…

1. Widely rumored to be gay, and

2. Widely considered a favorite to win the competition

Homosexuality has always had a significant place in the arts, but because the vast majority of the marketplace is straight, those in charge of marketing gay artists have often tried to hide those artists’ sexual identity. The article, while focusing on the “is he or isn’t he” speculation, also shows how far we’ve come from the days when

…studios forced Rock Hudson into bogus relationships with women and obliged gay actors “to lie from morning to night.”

In 1959 Liberace, the camp artifact best known, as one critic wrote, “for beating Romantic music to death on a piano decorated with a candelabra,” sued an English newspaper for libel for implying in print that he was gay… When asked on the witness stand whether he was homosexual, Liberace emphatically told a judge: “No, sir! I am against the practice because it offends convention and it offends society.” He won the suit and damages and then, much later, was named in a $113 million palimony suit by his partner Scott Thorson.

It’s worth noting the Boston Red Sox did not field a black player until that same year: 1959. Fifty years later, race doesn’t even register when the Most Valuable Player results are announced — but we still haven’t seen a gay Major League Baseball player come out during his playing career.

A previous American Idol runner-up,  Clay Aiken,  came out publicly — several years after his turn on the show was over. A half century after Liberace’s lawsuit, Adam Lambert can compete effectively in the most mainstream music competition imaginable, and allow the media to speculate as much as it wishes.

But he won’t quite let himself take the final step. The choice may be his, or his handlers’, or the show’s.

We’ll know that sexuality has ceased to be viewed as a marketing problem when a contestant comes out before the  votes are cast — and the New York Times doesn’t care.

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Click here to learn the shocking truth about Phil Bernstein

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

Unhappy Customers Don’t Need the Internet to Hurt You

I’ve written several times on the ways that the web has given consumers unprecendented influence on how companies are perceived. An angry customer an internet connection can tell his side of the story to thousands by posting it on a blog, a consumer forum, or the company’s own web site.

I’ve done it myself — hello, Superbookdeals!

Some consumers are still doing it the old-fashioned way. In the Oregonian’s “Complaint Desk” column, Laura Gunderson tells the story of David Haskew, a cable customer in Cornelius, Oregon. Haskew was unable to resolve an audio problem through the company’s regular channels (he chose not to name the company when recounting the story)

Finally, after seeing one of the company’s trucks drive by, he got an idea. That afternoon he knocked a sign into his front yard saying, “An unhappy customers of (mystery company name) lives here”. Maybe, he thought, an employee would see the sign and get the message to a big shot.

Sure enough, he said, an executive called within 48 hours. A service call was scheduled and, 10 minutes later, the problem was fixed.

So today’s lesson is simple. Yes, you should closely monitor web chatter about your company. But don’t forget to look for lawn signs.

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Click here to learn the shocking truth about Phil Bernstein

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.