It's all in the marketing (Photos)

Marketing is key to any business, how your product is perceived has an important relationship with its value.

A few weeks ago I was shopping for a dozen eggs, I was truly amazed at the vast array of egg options available to me. I'm not one to worry too much about free-range, vs organic, vs Hy-Vee's bargain egg variety. I usually just grab a dozen Grade A Large eggs and go on with my shopping. This time I took time to examine the other options as I thought it was an interesting study in the correlation between marketing and price.

Upon further examination I even found eggs in the "health food" section of the store. The varieties ranged from Brown eggs, Free Range, Cage Free, Vegetarian-fed eggs... (that one made me laugh), to Omega-3 eggs. I stood back and watched for a while as shoppers came by and picked up their eggs, most just looked for the best price, but some went straight to the fancy packaged, shrink-wrapped, expensive Omega-3 eggs. I couldn't help but chuckle imagining some guy at the egg farm with a little syringe injecting every egg with a potion of Omega-3 serum, whatever that might be.

Omega 3 eggs

Photo credit: 

Ben Edsall

So whats the difference? Well a recent study found that, on average, there was no substantial quality difference between types of eggs. So, no matter which specialty egg is chosen, it will be nearly the same quality as any other egg. So what makes people want to spend the extra money for an egg with a fancy wrapper?

Aside from a concern for animal welfare and perhaps the conditions the chickens are kept in, it is all mostly just a result of a successful marketing ploy and a lack of factual information.

So how does that relate to real estate and marketing real estate?

Like anything else the value of real estate is often what someone is willing to pay for it, even though there are valuation processes like appraisals and BPO's, the price is largely determined by the buyer.

The single most-frequently asked question in real estate now is, "do you have more pictures"! Using all of the best pictures available, using video and more is all part of the real estate marketing process. As well as targeting all of the senses of the buyer, simple things like putting vanilla extract on the light bulbs or using potpourri to enhance the environment, leaving on soft soothing music in the home to relax the guest and help cover outside sounds, like traffic noise.

Marketing is the process of performing market research, selling products and/or services to customers and promoting them via advertising to further enhance sales. (Wikipedia)

Marketing in the Internet era also includes a knowledge of SEO and targeting keywords and traffic to attract buyers to the listing. Marketing can also include gimmicks like offering free products or services, one such example is offering a free gun to homebuyers.