I met this guy last weekend at a conference, we’ll call him Matt. Noticing he had no fingers on his left hand, it turns out Matt was involved in a serious accident a few years ago while chopping wood at his home. Awful.
But what was more awful was to hear that Matt had previously been a bass player in a successful band. That had not only been his career, but his life-long passion. His one big thing. I was severely affected on hearing this story. Just imagine if in the blink of an eye, you could no longer do the one thing you love doing, ever again.
Interestingly, I was at the conference to present on the future of marketing, with one of the key highlights being brand consistency, a drum we’ve been beating for a while.
I immediately reflected on the conversations I hear my team having every day, and that I often have too. The ones we have with our agents about their marketing that at times can get quite heated! Our members are passionate about what they do, and so it’s really common to hear them insist they need some element of the Ray White branding to be a particular way, because they believe it will make or break the listing or the sale - or something, their entire career.
But really, does the position of the logo actually matter that much? If the signboard says “sale” or “for sale” will it change the prospective buyer’s mind? If your profile photo is black and white instead of colour, will the vendor list with you instead of someone else? While we might have personal preferences (and we clearly do), do our customers really care about these things as we think?
How about if we shifted the conversation though? How about if we stopped spending so much time sweating the small stuff and instead tackled the bigger conversations - those about how to be more tactical, how to improve the customer experience? Or about creating new and innovative marketing assets that might be missing from our range entirely, rather than trying to create endless iterations of the same thing?
If we’re all going to be honest, getting caught up in the small stuff is easy. It’s part of the human condition and completely forgivable. But even if real estate is your one big thing, the branding part is only the wrapping.
Lisa Pennell - Head of Marketing
