Think like a home buyer

In all my (many!) years in new homes marketing, one of most common traps I’ve seen clients fall into time and again is failing to ‘think like a home buyer’ – and, more importantly, think like a buyer of one of their own products.

Picture the scenario: you’re pitching some ideas for a development of first time buyer properties and you know from your market research that the likely demographic for buyers is 25 to 35 year old professional singles and couples. There’s a fair chance that these people are going to be pretty new media savvy – receptive to the web, social media, SMS etc., so you pitch a really neat idea based around SMS as an instant response point for the offline media activity. The client’s response? “I’d never use text to get details of houses for sale…” and it’s dead in the water.

What the client is doing of course is applying his own personal values when judging the optimum communications solution. But as we know, his demographic footprint is totally different to that of his target market.

It’s our job as marketing professionals to demonstrate and persuade the client that he needs to open his mind, and it’s a challenge that MMS relishes rising to. But with the development of web 2.0 and its infiltration into mainstream marketing communications it’s something that we’re going to have to work a lot harder at.