You may know HTC as the object of a lot of smart phone industry buzz.
What you may also know is that their phones – Evo, Aria, Eris and Incredible – are taking this industry by storm.
They’re kicking Nokia’s nuts and threatening Apple’s attempt to corner the market.
How is that happening? I decided to do a little checking. Seems they’re doing a lot right. More on that below. It also made me think it would be instructive to pull this brand through a cosmic wormhole and ask the question…
What would HTC look and talk like if they were a real estate company?
I imagined the Website. For starters their positioning copy might evoke the dream of making a phone call. Or attempt to convey, without substantiation, how much of a leader they are in the smart phone industry. They might even take a cue from a well-known east coast real estate brokerage and claim to have the best phone Website in the world. Or, maybe, they’d ditch positioning copy altogether in favor of dozens of square boxes filled with different fonts representing every department within HTC.
If HTC were a brokerage, their Website would have a marquee advertising the 70 years of experience they have that takes users to a page filled with large blocks of text about who they were before most users were born.
Their Website navigation would include things like “Calling” and “Answering” that point to pages containing content for users looking for indispensable advice on what a phone is. How to dial a number. There may be a starburst graphic highlighting “Muting.”
There would be links to features like texting. But real estate HTC wouldn’t call it texting. They’d come up with something clever like “Touch and Go” or “HTC’s Digital Word Send.”
There would be a page where users could search for HTC phone reps in their area with canned content about about every representative along with images taken by the reps themselves. Some images might be clear, others might not. Many might be representative of reps as they were years ago before life, age and wisdom left the indelible mark of honesty on their faces. Some might pose with phones. Others leaning against a tree. And of course, there’d be the oddball rep who cut-and-pasted their head onto a cell tower with rays of signal shooting out of each ear.
Users would only be able to view certain retail shops due to a bizarre policy about co-mingling information important to users.
If HTC were a real estate company, would you buy anything from them?
Macintosh apples to mandarin oranges
I hear the rumblings. “Davison, come on, you’ve gone too far. You can’t compare a real estate brokerage to a Taiwanese phone manufacturer. That’s apples to our oranges.”
Really? Well, step into my fruit bowl for a moment.
I can’t recall any college professor of mine ever segmenting any one industry from any other when it came to the high level mechanics of branding and communications.
In my time on Madison Avenue I never heard anyone cite the real estate industry as being so magnificently different that it must defy all the rules marketers hold dear.
I know everything you need to do right with digital marketing and branding is already on display across a myriad of industries.
You are not alone in your possession of internal greatness, historical legacy, and intellectual mojo. Just like you, HTC loves to tell the world how great it is. And they do, in a way that’s relevant to the customer.
What HTC really did
They took everything they are and compressed it down to one word.
The only one that matters.
You.
In a simple slide show on its home page, HTC tells a perfect story. You are the star of that story, a narrative of what HTC knows you want from your smart phone experience.
Superpowers. A bad ass camera. A fast Internet. A ridiculously big screen.
This is the conventional box of wisdom inside of which most of American business operates. It is the box too many in real estate resist entering. Sure, we spin tales too – of dreams delivered, awards won, pets loved, leadership amassed, legacy accumulated – things that could carry a ton of meaning if we would simply clarify why any of it matters to the people with whom we wish to connect.
What did HTC do?
They built great phones. And they built a better gateway through which you and I can discover them. They’re driving a massive market response as a result.
You’re a real estate company. An apple. They’re a phone company. An orange. You’re both fruit
‘Nuff said.
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Awesome!!! Well stated. You made my day.
Hey! Who ya callin’ a fruit?!
Good read and a good analogy. Customer service is not for one specific industry. If you don’t serve your customer you won’t have any customers to serve.
Marc,
As always great stuff and thought provoking. The struggle many in real estate have is the line between being creative and engaging, and just flat out cheesy. Being fun and interesting while being professional and informed.
It is tough to sex up and create a buzz around a business most people could care less about most of the time.
Marc, I’m sure that when you were on Madison Ave, no one even talked about real estate, because it’s always been an industry who believes that what they do is good enough, and everything they do is the best way to do it. As a former builder, who looks to agents to help me make a living, it’s scary just how horrible they do everything.
Be creative? Yearight. Their best marketing strategy is still a few free web listings, a street sign, a few open houses, and a lot of waiting for someone else to bring a buyer. Thankfully the market was great for a long time and homes sold by themselves, because in bad times, they have no idea how to make it work.
I saw one of Joel’s presentations online a while back where he quoted Einsteins Theory Of Insanity…that’s real estate brokerage…at it’s best.
You even went as far to say that most have learned the business the wrong way and are now teaching it the wrong way. The industry needs to attend the 1000WATT university and start paying attention to what’s going on in the real world.
I’d hate to have to sell my own home right now and have to deal with all the outdated mindsets that realtors bring to the table. It’s scary to leave the value of your home in the hands of a brokerage company who relies on luck more than skill.
Start your own franchise, and I’ll be in the long line to sign up with the rest of your followers.
Keep hammering away, maybe someone in brokerage land will eventually listen.
This post reminded of a local TV show I watched that had one of our area’s top producing (and still top producing) agents on it. She was attempting to be the “local” expert and was visiting a landscaping business where they were discussing gold fish ponds. There was the landscape company owner in his outdoor clothes standing next to the pond talking about how you install and maintain them. The camera then pans WAY right about 20 feet away…there she stood in all her high heeled glory, indifferent to what was actually going on…it was clear she was just there to get her face on the show so she could quickly scoot out to her afternoon capuchino. Everything was and still is about ME.
But she does sell a lot of real-estate.
Sent from my HTC EVO!
I really think this post is on point. There are many fantastic agents and firms who really do spend time finding ways to help their clients and make improve to their business. I think many or most of those well intentioned groups – including myself – do not always know the best way to communicate the simple words or tone that the clients want to hear.
In person, for many agents it is easier, the trust, feelings, experience, and other important attributes come out in conversation casually. When you attempt to transfer the essence of what people identify with you personally print and media it is difficult. Part of the reason is when it comes time to write the copy agents with experience, who care, feel forced to communicate their accomplishments in an effort to stand out from the rest.
After spending two weeks in CA – San Fran to LA (Inman, work, and vacation) I noted all the real estate ads with little knowledge of the market. (print, bus stop ads, billboards, and other materials) Being an agent I know the ads try to communicate that they have the experience, knowledge, understanding, and desire to be your agent. But, being a stranger to the area I could clearly see that most of the ads were misplaced and the message was lost in a sea of “I am #1, my brokerage is #1, my website rocked 5years ago, & my dog is cool too – hire me.” And I know from experience that it is very likely that some of those agents are probably excellent agents and have a lot more to offer than the copy on the bus stop.
As we start our new brokerage, recently left the big firm, we continue planning the build out of our current and future websites, and begin to craft our voice – I have taken you up on the challenge to create a message more like HTC. – I am a few drafts into the idea. We will see what happens.
John, you’re correct in observing that agents are more comfortable during face to face converversations and don’t know hopw to convey that to print, but the big problem with that is that agents don’t ever have a live concersation with 99% of the people who see their homes onlinne…and that’s where they have to make their best effort. Also, after the live walk thru the listing agent loses all contact with the potential buyer, so the marketing material once again has to make the listing the hot topic of conversation.
Like it or not, an agents role has changed and the key to success is online marketing…listings, websites, emails, texts and newsletters. That’s they way buyers search and ultimately make their decisions to purchase. Brokerage will never go back to where it was, so it has to catch up to the present and the future, or be worthless.
Every agent tells me that they speak better than they write, and I tell them to record themselves, and they’ll see how wrong they are. For decades agents have had it easy…they’ve been order takers. Those days are gone and now they have to be real business people, with a message of how they create solutions to problems and add value to sellers and buyers.
We all have to embrace and learn a new way of doing business, and youe site is a perfect example of a company who understands that. You blow away the major franchises who still don’t understand consumers, and they don’t care to. More power to you!
[...] A look at the marketing of HTC and how it can be implemented in real estate (via 1000watt): “You may know HTC as the object of a lot of smart phone industry [...]
[...] ) What could the real estate industry learn from a mobile phone company? In Apples, oranges and the real estate marketing fruit bowl, Marc Davison looks at the company HTC, which is on a roll in the mobile world, and asks what they [...]
Marc, I keep coming back to this post, and I always get something new and valuable from it. It is all about “YOU”, but realtors just don’t get it. As a young builder, I saw right away that agents/brokerage always boiled it down to fdr’s, flr’s, meik’s w granite tops and all the other realtor gobbledygook, that people already knew about. It’s never personalizing the home so that someone can say to themselves…”wow, I can see myself living here” (I think I stole that quote from you?…but I use it all the time…maybe royalties will follow one day). Everyone knows that a home has bedrooms, bathrooms a kitchen, so why list for them everything they already know. No one buys or gets excited about a home because it has rooms, they buy a home because of the lifestyle and family needs that it provides them, and yet look at every listing and all you see is nothing of value to the sale. It’s the worst sales approach in existence, and it hasn’t changed in 50 years.
I want my homes to stand out from the crowd and I want to give viewers the opportunity to fall in love with my homes online, so that when they call and visit, they’ve already started the love connection and the sales process. And I want them to have something creative and exciting for them to review and share when they’re home or at work, so MY home remains a hot topic of discussion, even when their agent is trying to sell them something else. And I want my marketing to better educate other agents so they to say WOW I need to show my customer this home. This is something that’s so easy to accomplish, yet no one does it. Is that too much to ask for?
Brokerage / Realtors have created the obstacles to selling homes faster and for higher prices.
It’s all about the home, and it’s all about getting quality calls rather than lots of calls. Brokerage has to learn how to stand out from their competitors rather than peddle the same merchandise the same exact way as their competitors.
A Realtors website is nothing than a storefront for a retailer. People gather around storefronts in NYC. Retailers know it’s a huge draw and know how valuable it is to their business…they don’t want people to walk past and make a purchase somewhere else. We see that ourselves every day when we walk by a store or visit a website that sucks, yet brokers expect their viewers to be different. The industry needs to look at the business from the eyes of the consumer, and not from their own side of the cash register.
Sorry, but most brokerage sites are like shopping at Kmart, when they need to be like Neimans.
At what point does the industry wake-up and see that they’ve got it all wrong…and change?
Apple beat the record, phone and book business (and others) at their own game, as did amazon with their kindles, and it’s only a matter of time that someone wipes out the existing online real estate business. You can only be asleep at the wheel for so long before you crash.
Sorry for babbling on and on, bit its so frustrating to those of us who have a home to sell
I was really excited to get my HTC Eris last fall because I could now be as cool as my clients… using all those free real estate apps, the compass, and Gmail. And I use it all day, all of it and the camera is good too.
Sorry, just took a call! How cool is that?
HTC was so smart that the hooked onto Google to make Android based phones. And baby, Google is one cash cow! They don’t really care if they make any money right now off this Android stuff because they will figure that out later. Their Android burn-rate must be amazing.
(Wait a minute, did you even mention the Google? Am I missing a subtle message here since it isn’t even mentioned in comments?)
But HTC is making a profit right now, raking in the sales numbers because they make the Android phone. Hmmm, would HTC be so cool if they weren’t Android based? I don’t think so.