Finger Licking Good Marketing – online real estate marketing lessons learned from KFC
April 13, 2009
Kentucky Fried Chicken has taken its “finger-licking-good” show on the 
road, literally. The iconic purveyor of America’s ultimate comfort food, ridiculously greasy deep fried chicken, has committed to fill 350 potholes in Louisville, KY. The only catch is that Colonel Sanders will be legally allowed to graffiti on the ground “Refreshed by KFC” stenciled drawings (KFC assures the citizens of Louisville that it is street chalk, so it’s not permanent).
Whether you assess this as a brilliant, pioneering marketing move or a just further perpetuation of unwelcomed, annoying, and invasive marketing techniques (a la the flashing banner ads of the early 2000′s) there is a lesson to be learned.
No, don’t go to the city council and ask the mayor if you can fix the potholes
in your market area in exchange for your advertisement spray-painted on the ground…
In essence, KFC is providing goodwill services for citizens of Louisville that will benefit thousands of people and are getting some well-deserved press in the process. People tend to appreciate acts of goodwill and usually have a favorable perception of them. Some consumers even consider this a decisive factor in whether to patronize one business over another! In the world of real estate marketing, it’s essential for realtors to be involved in some act of goodwill that conveys to the consumer that they are more than just commission hungry salespeople.
One way I’ve seen realtors do this recently is by becoming Ecobroker 
certified. Going Green is not just a buzzword but a movement that is being forged in the forefront of consumer’s minds, as more and more Americans is thinking greener about their purchasing decisions. When you become Ecobroker certified, you don’t just get additional letters at the end of your name on your stationary (although that is cool and I’m jealous), but you’re communicating to your clients that you are a person who cares about the environment and can help them make important decisions that are consistent with their commitments to environmental awareness.
While news stations will not be lined around your office to cover your Ecobroker designation and it won’t be nearly as entertaining as seeing Colonel Sanders fixing potholes, it will provide a competitive edge as a realtor in a much more subtle and non-ostentatious way.
Will going green produce actual generate the kind of green real estate 
agents are looking for? That is yet to be seen. Will the 350 potholes that KFC “refreshes” in Louisville produce more chicken sales? Well, perhaps it’s not a fair comparison because the 350 potholes will cost KFC effectively nothing -according to an inside informant KFC will “allegedly” fill the potholes with the grease left over from their deep-fryer, which anyone who has had left over chicken from KFC could tell you is not a bad idea =)
Online Marketing Lesson Learned from the Flower Shop by David Yim
Visiting flower shops is the equivalent of going to the dentist for me. I only go when I absolutely have to. I seldom enjoy the experience of purchasing plants wrapped in cellophane at ridiculous mark ups, especially when I know how fast they will end up with the empty egg carton and last night’s 
take-out…The only solace I find is the anticipation of joy to be had from the recipient, usually my lovely wife who has a genuine appreciation of flowers.
However, I can recount one particular trip to a florist that taught me an invaluable marketing lesson that I will expound on in this post.
It was the night that my then-girlfriend, now wife, was returning from an out of town conference for work. Being the charming knight in shining armor that I am, I decided to pick her up at the airport donning a nice bouquet to sweep her off her feet per usual. I went to a florist down the street from the cell phone store that I owned in a past life, and forked over $30 for what I expected to be a piece of biological art. What I got was a so-so arrangement that was as plain as oatmeal, but I didn’t have the bravado or the floral aptitude to express my dissatisfaction in an intelligible manner. So I drove home trying to silence the dissonance of discontent brooding in my head, but no amount of talk radio would drown it out.
Eventually I stopped suppressing the inescapable need for new flowers and emotionally prepped myself to purchase a whole new set. I reluctantly pulled in to Ashby Flower Shop in Berkeley
, and as soon as I walked in the door, I was welcomed by a gentleman who greeted me with a strange look of sympathy. It was as if he knew the state of anguish gripping my mind. I guess it is a dead give-away when you walk into a shop with flowers… I explained to him the quandary I was in and he calmly took my lifeless bouquet to his floral station. With nothing more than a few bunches of floral filler and a couple of square inches of decorative paper, this maestro transformed my bouquet into an arrangement worth of a woman’s adoration . I instinctively reached into my pocket to grab the plastic, and what transpired next was absolute marketing perfection…
“Don’t worry man. You paid good money for these flowers. It’s on the house, just remember us the next time you need flowers…”
This seemingly insignificant act of pro bono goodwill had just won him a customer and evangelist for as long as I lived in the bay area. He forsook immediate monetary gain for the possibility of winning multiple future opportunities to provide floral service. What does this have to do with Real Estate online marketing you ask? I’m glad you asked that question.
Have you ever received a “lead” only to discover that the consumer had the audacity to ask for information or services from you that do not directly correlate to instant dollars in your pocket? Let’s be honest here. How many 
of you trash that request or call your lead generation company immediately and give them a piece of your less than friendly mind? I’ve been on the other side of the phone for my fair share of frustrated rants as many of my clients complain about consumers wanting free information from one of our programs called Agent View.
With this marketing platform, we provide agents opportunities to engage exclusively with online consumers who are looking for real estate 
information such as home values, featured listings, blog articles, and home seller tips in their particular zip code. One of the features that agents have a qualm about is the home valuation tool, which provides a consumer with an estimated price value range. For consumers who want a more detailed valuation, we can provide a custom home valuation performed by a professional realtor who covers that zip code.
Now, if you’ve been in the industry for a bit, you know that a Comparative 
Market Analysis request does not equal a signed 6 month exclusive listing agreement. A CMA request is just that- a request for a comparative market analysis. Online marketing companies do not screen for the internal motivations of people requesting this information.
Until we learn how to incorporate Honda’s mind-reading technology into our 
Home Valuation platform, the reasons for home valuation requests will continue to vary from “I want to sell my house” to the often-maligned “I want to check if my current realtor’s price for my home is valid!”.With that said, there are two main complaints that I’ve heard about regarding the Cost Market Analysis requests produced by our Agent View platform:
1) They just want to know their value to refinance
2) They are already working with a realtor and just want to know if he/she is pricing it competitively.
Are these valid reasons to trash what I’m arguing is an “opportunity to engage with a homeowner?” In both cases stated above, a homeowner is involved, right? If you are a realtor, any homeowner requesting information from you is WORTH following up with, because every homeowner will at some time need the services of a real estate professional. So what if I contacted you because I wanted to know my home value to refinance my home? Is that an opportunity? So what if I’m 
working with a realtor and just want to make sure he is not shortchanging me? Is that not an even better opportunity? What I’m suggesting is that we take a page out of the florist’s marketing book and treat every single request, whether it be pro bono in nature or the proverbial “low hanging fruit”, as what it is: an opportunity to present your expertise and professional services.
The florist took my situation and “bloomed” it (pun-intended) into an opportunity to showcase his skills and planted a nagging seed in my head – “man, if he did this for me when I didn’t pay him, just think what he would do for me if I did pay him!” When you invest the 10 minutes into putting together a CMA (if it takes you more than 10 mins, you’re using the wrong online tools), and send it to Mr. “I want to refi” or Mr. “I don’t quite trust my realtor”, you just engaged with that homeowner and left some sort of impression that may or may not pan out into commission dollars. But that is what marketing is all about right?
Whether you like it or not, we are entering into, if not already immersed in, a marketplace where consumers are hungry for information and gathering it at 
a torrid pace through alternative mediums (i.e. blogs, emails, text messages, tweets, etc.). This means that the realtors who harness the power of web 2.0 tools to get to these consumers need to redefine their understanding of leads to have sustained success. Trashing every request from a consumer that doesn’t meet your immediate monetary concern is thinking way too short term. Imagine if that florist just sold me another bouquet. As nice as it may have been, it would not have come close to the impact that he had when he forsook immediate compensation for multiple future opportunities. Next time you get a home valuation request from someone who just wants to refi, think twice before trashing it or yelling at your poor HomeGain rep =)
