Brave New World
Print is back. A whole new crop of high style luxury magazines, printed on beautiful paper with beautiful photography, aspires to tempt our affluent populations with luxury goods, luxury destinations, Avant-garde art and tastemakers and, of course, luxury real estate. Watching this new crop of print media proliferate, I can’t help but think of the often opaque difference for us, as real estate brokerage practitioners, between advertising and marketing.
During my early years in real estate brokerage, in the 1980s, we as an industry only advertised. The word “brand” had not entered our collective vocabulary and we placed ads, more or less exclusively in the Classified section of the New York Times Sunday Real Estate section, as a way of disseminating information about our listings to the general public. The public, in turn, had no way of learning about what was on the market except through the ads. And since not every agent had every listing (there was no such thing as an exclusive in New York in those days), buyers had to work with a number of agents to make sure they covered the marketplace.
The Classified ads served two functions; they were our primary (and often only) way of alerting buyers to what was available in the marketplace and persuading them to contact us, while at the same time alerting us to properties on the market about which we were unaware. Each Monday we circled ads placed by our competitors touting properties we didn’t know about, and then we put our heads together in the office to try and figure out what they could be.
Over time, other print alternatives entered the marketplace. Expensive properties could be placed in our ultra-luxury outlet, the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Magazines such as Quest and Avenue, produced on a shoestring during those early years, combined real estate and other luxury ads with gossipy content and party photos designed to appeal to Upper East Side ladies.
We all began to recognize that we needed a visual identity, and that how that visual identity presented to the public actually made a difference. In other words, the age of marketing dawned for us. Suddenly we weren’t just trying to sell properties by participating in the “sea of sameness” which was the Sunday Classifieds. We needed a distinct color. A logo. Visual language which conveyed something about the company. A “brand.”
Not long after, the Internet appeared and began to erode, over a period of years, the primacy of print ads as a format for selling property. Little by little, online search, so convenient and so comprehensive, replaced the classified print ad, much to the distress of The New York Times, whose real estate Classified section is today little more than 15 or 20% of what is used to be. At the same time, those luxury magazines proliferated. The Times Magazine, Quest, and Avenue were joined by a host of imitators, which rose and fell as print was declared dead during the last recession. And for a while it seemed that it was. But now it’s back, with a difference.
All agents understand today that print does not sell properties: all buyers go straight to the Internet to search. For the brokerage, print is a pure branding play. Sellers like its tangibility, even if they understand that it’s irrelevant as a sales tool. For corporate owners like me it serves the purpose of defining the company’s identity. Is the look old fashioned or fashion forward? Is the type face fusty or hip? Is the color bold or conservative? A host of subtle cues: paper quality, color, layout, logo, subliminally communicate about the brand. And brand consultants earn fees in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for “re-branding” companies. This isn’t advertising. This is marketing – creating a face to engage the public, a face which is consistent through the website, business cards, property brochures, marketing materials and yes, print ads. Sometimes I yearn for the simple old days when we just placed ads in order to sell apartments. But those days are gone forever. It’s a brave new world.
