The Classifieds Section is always a good source to grasp the market situation and to study what your competitors are doing. I realise that while majority of the agents are still marketing their properties in the traditional advertise-and-wait manner (like what I am doing now waiting for calls to come in as I draft this discussion), some of us are already stepping up to another level of innovative marketing and branding.

One interesting idea is the shift of marketing from traditional one-to-one approach to a one-to-many approach. This could be seen from the efforts of a particular group of producers holding exhibition-cum-seminar on a specific niche market at a specific venue, inviting buyers and sellers alike to attend. And they do this innovatively by roping in related industry players like architects/renovators and bankers to participate as well. By tapping on the expertise of other relevant players, questions from interested clients could be immediately addressed with confidence and naturally a higher level of trust could be achieved.  This is impressive!

And this is a hit on the nail, isn’t it? Building TRUST and BRAND is always the ultimate business fundamental of our business.

I am glad that such innovative attempts of one-to-many LEVERAGE approach has kicked off among competitors. I had detailed this in my 2010 launch of TheSalesTortureChamber.com. With more competition challenging my Team’s SingaporePropertySeminars.com marketing concept, it keeps me on my toes to bring the competition to a higher level.

Healthy competition is always good.  This forces our team again to think out of the box.  We are en route to awe fellow salespersons with efforts and ideas that could cause quite a stir in the days to come.

In retrospect, such extent of innovative marketing activity could never be achieved if the following ingredients are absent:

1). A creative mastermind and experienced team leader. Someone who constantly understand the needs of clients and seeks new frontiers in churning out more productive and enterprising manner.

2). A co-operative team of agents to comply and collaborate with the master plan of the leader by compromising differences, inconvenience and sometiems discomfort.

3). Effective marketing and branding campaigns to announce the initiatives and sometimes even to the extent of creating heightened hype and talk among consumers and industry players.

4). And of course a well thought system to be able to share leads, costs and profits in a reasonably fair manner, though sometimes in practical situations, a 100% fairness in every aspect of operations may not be achievable.
Hence, the readiness of the team to accept compromises and scarifices is also crucial.

5). Creativity within the boundaries of regulations.

Notice that I have been focussing on “team” when it comes to innovative activities of a certain scale. In my humble opinion, no matter how productive or resourceful a person is, there is a limit to the level of creativity or innovation that a person could put in place to an individual’s marketing campaign and keeping 100% of transactional profits. I foresee a fast trend for like-minded individuals in specific niche market to come together to ward off competition and increase productivity, very much like mergers and acquistions of the corporate world. This will pose a danger to team leaders who have become stagnant or lack creative ideas to elevate the real estate business to a higher level for the entire team.

So what are your views on innovative branding and marketing?
What have you tried previously but failed?
Do you disagree with the areas that I have discussed above?
What other trends do you foresee in creative marketing/branding?

I believe everyone would look forward to each other’s views for a detailed discussion. I look forward to reading your comments.