The key to finding a brand’s story is making sure that the consumer’s, the brand agents’ and competing agents’ views of that brand all align, Marine told Inman Connect New York attendees.
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Anywhere Brands Chief Marketing Officer David Marine knows a good story when he sees one.
He’s 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 starting a new brand campaign, Marine said he asks, “What is the story for each brand?”
He pointed to a few campaigns that have recently rolled out from 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,” BHGRE’s “Nobody Knows Homes Better” (tied to its lifestyle magazine), and Coldwell Banker’s popular Thursday Night Football Move Meter Match-Up.
The Move Meter Match-Up has been “a massive success,” Marine added, with the real estate brand comparing the two cities facing off in Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football game, from every factor from cost of living to accessibility. The ad has become so popular it’s now the No. 2 ad outside of Gillette on Thursday Night Football, Marine said.
Of course, Anywhere is a huge company with a lot of resources, Dalrymple pointed out. So how can other, smaller companies also effectively measure the success of their marketing efforts?
“The dirty secret is measuring effectiveness is no longer limited to the largest advertisers,” Marine said. “Someone spending $100 per month can have access to the same data points.”
Marketing officers and other stakeholders need to first establish what their goals are for a campaign and then put systems in place to be sure they can measure ad traffic and the completion of those specific goals, Marine said. That means, measuring engagement on a social campaign, adding pixels to a website to track visitor data, and more.
Of course, finding a brand’s individual story is another matter, Dalrymple and Marine agreed.
“When you know what your story is and you can communicate that clearly and effectively, it is timeless marketing,” Marine said.
The key is to determine the consumer’s view of the brand, the brand’s agents’ own view of the brand, and competing agents’ view of the brand, and then analyze where the differences among those perspectives are, Marine said. He does that by conducting surveys among all parties.
“And then you have to ask, ‘Is that what we want [the story] to be, as a brand?’” Marine said.
He also advised writing out the brand’s value proposition in one sentence. “If you can replace the subject with any other brand, it’s not good,” he noted.
“You want to make sure your value proposition or your story is unique to you,” Marine said.
Through analyzing the data points and consumer feedback mechanisms, marketing officers can determine if there’s a disconnect between the story the brand is trying to tell and the story the consumer is receiving, Marine said.
“What you really want to do is dive down a little deeper and ask, ‘Why did you want to use us?’” Marine said.
“Do some A/B testing of messaging — see what people are most responsive to. That will identify some of the gaps.”
After a tumultuous year in real estate that included a slow market, antitrust litigation and more, Dalrymple wondered if these major happenings in the industry impacted how Anywhere conducted its campaigns. Marine’s response was that, even when crazy things are happening in the world, if it’s a good brand campaign, it should not be impacted by any outside factors.
He pointed to the fact that Coldwell Banker had planned a new brand campaign to launch in March 2020, well in advance of learning about the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic hit, the brand wondered if they should move forward with the campaign — and it ended up being just the right time for such a campaign.
“Does it make sense for us to talk about this in this environment?” Marine said the team wondered at the time. “And what we found was, it was the perfect time to do it. Because that messaging resonated with consumers at a time when home was more important than anything.”
“The beauty is that we didn’t plan to launch it during a pandemic; we planned it for a normal market,” Marine added. But they learned that if it could work during a global pandemic, it was a campaign that could work anytime.
“That is timeless marketing that can work in any market condition,” he said.