One of my first jobs after I got out of college was with a regional advertising agency in Houston called Black, Rogers, Sullivan & Goodnight (BRSG). Rather comically, the partners never quite settled on how to order their last names in the moniker and at one point (until they wised up) the abbreviation was BGRS, which prompted snickers far and wide. For a while, I even headed toward making a career in advertising. But the shiny object that was investment management & finance lured me away.
Even as I toiled in finance listening to portfolio managers trying to explain the difference between a “bull steepening” of the yield curve versus a “bear flattening” of same, I kept my mind for marketing. In fact, I was arguably one of the few writers capable of making mundane portfolio manager ramblings sound interesting to the average Ferrari driver.
I’ve therefore always found it 1) perplexing, and 2) a bit silly, and 3) not terribly smart that many of the best real estate agents, who work under a brand as strong as Sotheby’s is, abandon that brand strength in favor of “developing” their own.
This is dumb.
When I launched this site over a year ago, the purpose was simply to get the content up and to get my message across. It served that purpose well. Believe it or not, this little thing gets a lot of traffic, even when I’m just sitting on my hands.
Leveraging the Brand
It simply makes the most sense for me to associate myself closely with the Sotheby’s brand, since it’s one of the strongest around, and I work there and stuff. So while this site is not a company property, so to speak, I’ve redesigned it to operate perfectly with my Sotheby’s site, and indeed, to be so closely in line that there is no real difference to the viewer. You’ll note that among a host of smaller improvements:
• The navigation at the top looks essentially identical to the Sotheby’s site
• I’ve added a property-search feature
• The branding is the same
• Switching back and forth between the two is pretty much seamless.
So why bother to write a post on this? Well, if you entrust me to sell your property, you should be interested to know that I understand marketing and do it fairly competently; this is just one small part of that.
Leave a Reply