The key to finding a brand story is making sure that the views of the buyer, the brand’s agents and the brand’s competitive agents are all aligned, Marine told attendees at the Inman Connect event in New York.
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Anywhere Chief Marketing Officer David Marine knows a good story when he sees one.
He helped lead some of Anywhere’s biggest campaigns for its brands, including Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, Century 21, Coldwell Banker and ERA.
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On Wednesday at Inman Connect New York, Marine shared with Inman’s Jim Dalrymple II how he found the right stories for each brand and how he knew those stories were reaching the right audiences.
Before launching a new product campaign, Marine said he asks, “What is the story behind each product?”
He has featured in several recently launched campaigns for Anywhere brands, including Century 21’s “The Joy of Home” (which happened to be featured on a billboard in Times Square), ERA’s “Move Up”, and BHGRE’s “Nobody Knows Homes Better”. ” (tied to lifestyle magazine), and Coldwell Banker’s popular Thursday Night Football Move Meter Match-Up.
The Move Meter Match-Up was a “huge success,” Marine added, in which the real estate company compared the two cities facing Amazon Prime’s Thursday night football game, on everything from cost of living to accessibility. The ad has become so popular that it is now the No. 2 ad outside of Gillette on Thursday Night Football, Marine said.
Of course, Anywhere a large company has a lot of resources, Dalrymple pointed out. So how can other, smaller companies measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts?
“The dirty little secret is measuring effectiveness is no longer limited to large marketers,” Marine said. “Someone spending $100 a month can access the same data points.”
Marketing executives and other stakeholders need to first determine what their campaign goals are and then put plans in place to make sure they can measure ad traffic and the completion of those specific goals, Marine said. That means, measuring engagement in a social media campaign, adding pixels to a website to track visitor data, and more.
Of course, finding the individual product story is another matter, Dalrymple and Marine agree.
“If you know what your story is and you can communicate it clearly and effectively, it’s timeless marketing,” says Marine.
The key is to get the consumer’s view of the product, the brand’s own agents’ view of the product, and the competitor’s agents’ view of the product, and then analyze where the differences are between those views, says Marine. He does that by conducting research among all parties.
“And then you have to ask, ‘Is that what we want [the story] to be, like a symbol?’” Marine said.
He also advises writing a product value proposition in one sentence. “If you can change the title to any other type, it’s not good,” he said.
“You want to make sure that your value proposition or your story is unique to you,” Marine said.
By analyzing data points and consumer response patterns, marketing executives can determine if there’s a disconnect between the story the brand is trying to tell and the story the consumer is getting, Marine said.
“What you really want to do is dive a little deeper and ask, ‘Why did you want to use it?'” says Marine.
“Do A/B testing of messaging – see what people respond to the most. That will reveal some of the gaps.”
After a tumultuous year in real estate that included a slow market, antitrust lawsuits and more, Dalrymple wondered how these big industry events have affected Anywhere’s campaigning. Marine’s response was that, even if crazy things happen in the world, if it’s a good product campaign, it shouldn’t be affected by any outside factors.
He revealed that Coldwell Banker has planned a new campaign to launch in March 2020, long before we learn about the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic hit, the brand wondered if they should go ahead with the campaign – and it turned out to be the right time for such a campaign.
“Does it make sense for us to talk about this in this place?” Marine said the team was surprised at the time. “And what we found was, it was the perfect time to do it. Because that message resonated with consumers at a time when the home was more important than anything else. “
“The good thing is that we did not plan to introduce it during the epidemic; we have planned it for the general market,” added Marine. But they learned that if it could work in a time of global violence, it was a campaign that could work anytime.
“That’s timeless marketing that can work in any market situation,” he said.
Email Lillian Dickerson
