Luxury Real Estate Marketing Essentials — Language of Luxury

An iconoclast is a person who challenges conventional wisdom and traditional beliefs, and often shatters the very foundations upon which traditional, institutions rest. Iconoclasts are some the of best examples of personal branding and are worth studying if you are interested in standing out as a luxury real estate marketing professional.

David Foster, also known as the “Hit Man”, certainly is an iconoclast and a “one-man-brand”. As a record producer, composer, songwriter, and singer, he has won countless Grammy Awards and has introduced many artists who have gone on to be superstars in their own right like Josh Groban and Michael Bublé.

His roster of clients include Whitney Houston, Barbara Streisand, Celine Dion, Andrea Bocelli, Natalie Cole, Mariah Carey , Cher , Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Madona, Prince, Shania Twain, Donna Summer, Kenny Rogers, Chaka Khan. Most recently he is guiding the career of Jackie Evancho, the eleven year old child protégé with an operatic voice who “sings like an angel”.

Foster won his first Grammy for “After the Love Is Gone” by Earth, Wind and Fire. Since then he has worked with many bands including Chicago, Destiny’s Child, and the Bee Gees. He even won a Grammy for the best Broadway musical cast album of Dreamgirls.

In an interview on PBS where his “Hitman Returns” TV concert has recently been airing to help with fundraising, he had something very interesting to say about his “secret” to such a long successful career. He said that work keeps coming to him; he does not go after work. He just lets it come to him.

This is one of the best descriptions we have heard regarding the phenomenon that occurs when a person is operating their career “in the zone”, or what we call “operating spot on one’s authentic brand signal”. Foster “expects” to continuously create mega hits. And, so do the artists who hire him. He expects to deliver and they expect results. That is his secret for success.

When you are fully operating on your authentic personal brand signal it feels exhilarating. It is like singing in perfect pitch, in your best key, expecting the best outcome. Incidentally, David Foster is actually one of the rare human beings who have perfect pitch, musically.

Tuning into your authentic brand signal is one of the most important keys to your own success in marketing luxury real estate. If you then maintain the steady, stable state of positive expectation, the expectation of attracting business, the way will continuously present itself. And, it will start to feel perfectly natural and normal when business keeps flowing your way. Reach for this state of mind and, like the Hit Man, great results will surely follow.

If you haven’t already seen his TV concert you can catch most of the numbers on Foster's You Tube Channel here. We think you will truly enjoy the experience of seeing an iconoclast at work.

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To the extent that incumbent market leaders rest on their laurels, do not stay focused or do not keep up with technology, market leadership is up for grabs for any luxury real estate marketing professional with a superior value proposition and the right brand strategy. Market leaders beware! With the right brand strategy the tables can be turned on you in one year or less, seemingly, overnight.

What a difference one year can make! Take a look at what happened to the previous market leader, Nokia, in the smart phone market category. They slipped from #1 to #3. According to market research firm Strategy Analytics:

Apple's market share rose to 18.5% in the second quarter from 13.5% a year earlier
Samsung's smartphone market share jumped to 17.5% from 5.0%
Nokia slipped to 15.2% from 38.1% a year earlier.

To surpass Apple going forward, Strategy Analytics says #2 Samsung will need a three-fold strategy to:

Boost its retail presence for smart phones in countries such as the U.S., China, Japan and the U.K
Continuously upgrade its phones based on Google Inc's Android software, as well as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows platform and its own Bada operating system
Develop advanced cloud-based services

That is going to take some doing. Apple, by far, has the best customer service experience in just about any retail category. Recently, we discovered that we could not access the internet via our home WiFi on our iPad; yet we were able to connect with our laptop (PC) computer. We took the iPad into our local Apple store and encountered superlative service. They reinstalled and updated our software on the spot, free of charge, and it was fixed within minutes.

How can Samsung beat that? The idea of having this level of LOCAL service and product education for ALL of our mobile devices and computers in one place is a value proposition that simply cannot be rivaled. Apple is in the process of rolling out 24 large new stores in China, alone.

As a busy husband and wife team, who travels extensively, saving time is essential and so is the ease of sharing digital information and media. Learning to use one brand of software/hardware is much more efficient than learning to use multiple brands. Being able to instantly sync all of our data, apps and media between all devices and computers, plus having everything readily accessible online in the cloud, 24/7 (coming this fall from Apple), is an offering that Samsung or Nokia will be very hard-pressed to match.

Other brands may have some outstanding or even better product features. But, for us, Apple’s unique selling proposition is inimitable. As the challenger to the market leader (which Apple was until it became the leader) you must be able to articulate your superior value proposition in a nano-second. Here is how this plays out with Apple in just 7 words (our words):

Local Service + Total Product Integration +Wireless Synchronization

In luxury real estate marketing, when you can distill and express your distinct, extraordinary promise of value in just a few words, and those words are remarkable, people will voluntarily spread those words for you (like we just gladly did for Apple), That is how you can quickly turn the tables on the incumbent market leader in your marketplace, catching them off-guard.

See Part 2 of This Blog Series