I was shopping yesterday with Senior Management (the wife) to the local JD Sports store. Senior Management needed some trainers (as we walk our rescue dog Joey twice a day (Jack Russell cross with a Corgi).
There was a wall full of trainers, the choice was amazing, until you took a step back and had a good look. Something struck me that I want to share with you. They all looked the bl**dy same!
The next time you have five minutes, why don’t you pop in JD Sports or any other sports shop and go to the trainer section and have a look the all the trainers yourselves and see what I saw. I found little to distinguish or differentiate one trainer from another. Hundreds of them .. and they all looked the same.
They were all made from the same material, same sort of look and feel.
I asked the assistance why that was, and she replied, “When one trainer company starts designing and making with a new kind of material or style for their trainer and it sells really well, all the others trainer manufacturers follow suit.”
The same patterns emerge in estate and letting agency I thought.
Every estate and letting agency seeks to be distinctive, unique, to stand out and create something of significance —yet when it comes to implementing on those ambitions in our marketing, we imitate, dumb down and stray towards the middling average.
Our websites look the same (banner across the top, then a navigation bar with home, sales, lettings, about us, etc) and pages of the text using the world like professional, local expert, x years of experience etcetc
Our marketing leaflets look the same, name across the top, telephone at the bottom and a series of bullet points telling people what makes you as an agent so marvellous.
We use marketing to prove that we are distinctive and unique…
Its just when look in practice, we as agents don’t do that. Instead, we head where every other agent is heading in terms of marketing, because being at the edge and doing something different in any aspect of life (including our marketing), feels uncertain and very risky….
..and that is why the national call-centre estate agents have been able to secure a beachhead on our industry.
We have let them get that beachhead because we have become standardised and homogenised as an industry… we all look identical in the eyes of the consumer.
We have become indistinguishable as agents .. because the public sees us all like travel agents .. we are perceived to ‘all the same’
But my intuition tells me the opposite is true. Most agents in the UK aren’t all the same, you are passionate about your business and your clients, it’s just your marketing isn’t showing that. You need your marketing to prove that, you need to stand out from the 20, 30, 50, 100 other agents in your town
You stand out when you stand for something— when you go to a place your peers or competitors aren’t prepared to go.
What are you going to stand for?
I know what I would do … for my answer … either go to my blog with 500+ posts on attracting landlords and vendors to and estate/letting agency going back to 2013 or my YouTube channel with over 80 videos on attracting landlords and vendors to and estate/letting agency