August-2008
Right Side Marketing
800-456-4395
www.rightsidemarketing.com
presents
The Right Times
Marketing Wisdom About “Cultivating Client Relationships”
For samples, prices & info
about the following
prospecting programs,
please call Jill or Rand
Fleischman at (800) 4564395 or visit our website:
www.rightsidemarketing.
com or e-mail us at:
[email protected].
d
LENDER LETTER,
an economic newsletter for
mortgage professionals to
send to clients, prospective clients, and referral
sources.
d
REAL ESTATE REPORT,
a newsletter for real estate
professionals to send to your
more sophisticated clients
d
ULTIMATE PROSPECTING
TOOL, a newsletter for real
estate professionals to
send to California clients
and potential clients
d
WEDNESDAY WRAP FOR
THE WEB, weekly “hot off
the press” economic updates
for your web site, or for
broadcast fax &/or e-mail to
clients and referral sources.
d
NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
for Realtors® and Lenders.
Weekly informational columns for local papers.
d
WEDNESDAY WRAP by
“The Wrap Man” for title
reps to send to real estate
professionals.
O
MNEMONIC
MASTERPIECES
kay, I’ll admit from the get-go here
that I’ve always wanted to use that
word, “mnemonic,” in a Right Times
story. It’s something that helps you remember something else, like the little song high
school math teachers use to help students
memorize the quadratic formula.
I am gathering all such phrases (and
even, I suppose, songs) in a huge bag labeled, “slogans,” even though there must
be a better word with a broader meaning. In any case, here are a few of Rand’s
favorite slogans: “Think Different” (Apple).
“Just Do It” (Nike). “You’re in good hands
with”…need we even say it? These are all
thought-provoking.
A few of Bill’s favorites: “Ingredients for
life” (Safeway). “All the News that’s Fit to
Print.” And the expression on a tee shirt I
got my wife and sister-and-law: “Instant
Human…Just Add Coffee.”
WHEN TO CHANGE
YOUR SLOGAN [BY RAND]
I
t could be that your slogan no longer
packs much electricity. This can happen for various reasons, and it doesn’t
necessarily mean you have to dig a hole and
bury the slogan you’ve used for years. You
can still use it occasionally—unless it has
become either irrelevant or inappropriate—
but do create a new, lively slogan to take its
place and carry your banner forward.
We held on to a slogan for over twenty
years, and then discovered we’d grown up
a bit…and we needed something new to
say about ourselves.
Right Side Marketing started out in 1985
providing small independent real estate
brokerages with newspaper column advertising and our slogan at the time was “Image
Building Advertising.”
Continued on page 3
Guess Where We Are Now!
Fill in the blanks GE’s “Progress is our
most important…” “We will sell no wine
before…” Etc., etc.
And here’s one that worked very well
for me in my early real estate career: “Bill
Fisher…The Village San Juan Specialist.” It
was what I wanted people to know about
me—that I was the guy to call if they had
any interest in Village San Juan. Even before I knew enough about this neighborhood to make such a claim, I called myself
the Village San Juan Specialist, creating a
rather extreme motivation to learn everything I possibly could about the area I was
specializing in. Soon, in fact, no one knew
more than did I.
Continued on page 2
Jill and Rand are at one of our favorite haunts
best known for the preservation of endangered species. We love to go here to hike, see
“wild animals” and even feed the brilliantly
colored lorikeets! Guess Where We Are
Now and win a $25 free lunch!
© Copyright 2008. Every effort has been made to verify the information herein, but it cannot be guaranteed, nor should
it be used as a substitute for professional advice. For further specifics, or to answer any questions, feel free to call.
P
Page 2
earls of Wisdom From the Experts
“Slogans are typically self-indulgent afterthoughts that have little substance. This is a shame,
because like the P.S. on a letter, they virtually always
get read.
When I was growing up, the hot slogans were G.E.’s
“Progress is our most important product” and Zenith’s
“The quality goes in before the name goes on.” Both
are cleverly crafted, but like nine-tenths of the slogans
written today, they’re all out of steam and don’t pass
my acid test for a great slogan: Can it stand by itself in
selling your product?
If you’re thinking the Crown Books slogan doesn’t have
much bite anymore either, you’re right. It lost at least 75
percent of its teeth during the decade or so
that nearly every other bookstore chain in
America followed in its discounting footsteps. But when Crown first came on the
scene, it had the discount-starved bookbuying public virtually all to itself.”
-Murray Raphael, Summit Business
Media COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage
Learning
MNEMONIC MASTERPIECES…Continued from page 1
Top 10 Tag lines
1. Got milk?
(1993, California Milk
Processor Board)
2. Don’t leave home
without it
(1975, American Express,
AXP)
3. Just do it
(1988, Nike, NKE)
4. Where’s the beef?
(1984, Wendy’s)
5. You’re in good hands
with Allstate
(1956, Allstate Insurance,
ALL)
6. Think different
(1998, Apple Computer,
AAPL)
7. We try harder
(1962, Avis)
8. Tastes great, less filling
(1974, Miller Light)
9. Melts in your mouth,
not in your hands
(1954, M&M Candies)
10. Takes a licking and
keeps on ticking
(1956, Timex)
Slogans That Are the Real Thing,
Karen E. Klein 8/4/2005,
Business Week
This little bread-and-butter “farm”
area provided me an extremely good
living for a few years (before I foolishly
responded to the siren call of office management). People in the neighborhood
referred to me as the Village San Juan
Specialist, as did a lot of people outside
of the neighborhood, including other
real estate professionals, who called me
when they wanted to know something
about the area…like what I had listed at
the time.
Of course, there
was more involved
than merely hanging a great slogan
from my name, but
it helped immensely. As did the two
newsletters I sent
out each month,
the annual ar ts
and crafts festival
I sponsored, and
the summer games
for neighborhood
kids.
probably 99 weak ones. Having thought
about this a great deal (and devoted
a chapter of my book, You Are Not A
House, to the subject) I would have to
suggest three qualities:
Must Ring True
First, a good slogan (“My Satisfaction is
Measured by the Quality of Your Transaction”) is true, genuine and sincere. There
needs to be something about the person using the slogan that makes the
slogan ring true—
something about
the person’s other
marketing materials, reputation, way
of doing business.
Congrats to Eugene & Melissa Adan,
who guessed that Jill and Rand were
at Kansas City Barbecue, where Top
Gun was filmed, along with niece, Kristina, nephew, Jeb, grand nephew, Baby
Jeb and ?? (...soon to be announced.
Good luck to the Broughs!) Enjoy your
free lunch, Eugene & Melissa! And
thanks to all who entered the contest.
So how do you
come up with an
apt slogan that
people will immediately identify with
you and how do
you make sure it means something
good—at a gut-and-heart level—about
the way you do business?
For every strong slogan, there are
Second, it re ally doesn’t work
to create a slogan
that is obviously
an attempt at being clever and commercial. People will
resist it the same
way they resist an
overly aggressive
sales pitch.
Third, it has to set
you apart from your
competition—as
if that competitive didn’t even exist, if
that’s possible. Rather than saying you’re
the best, I think you want to say you’re
the only one to consider doing business
with.
A
Page 3
nother Side of Bill Fisher...
My middle stepchild—Jordyn, about to become 16—lies in bed
upstairs, laid low and miserable by the removal of four wisdom teeth
early this morning.
I tip-toe into her room, a shrine to all she loves—from Michael J. Fox to Salvador
Dali—and she lies in bed on her side, barely moving. But an eye opens, and she
gives me a vague three-fingered “hello” wave.
I can’t help myself. Seeing her in pain makes my stomach queasy. I would take
on some or all of that pain in an instant if only I could. But it is hers; it isn’t mine
to take or to experience, any more than are most of the hard knocks her life will
bring her. (I fear that she belongs to the Mack Truck School of Enlightenment, just
as I do. The lessons come fast and hard, and if we miss them, they come faster
and harder the next time.)
A Bit of Ice Cream Perhaps?
“Can I get you anything?” I ask, knowing that the full range of what she can
ask for is very small. More ice. A bit of ice cream or pudding. A sip of cranberryapple juice.
She manages to make a sound vaguely associated with the word, “No.”
I stand, mute and stupid, remembering my dear father, on a dark morning
that I spent with tears in my eyes, swallowing sobs. “You all right?” he asked. No,
I wasn’t, and I was pretty sure I never would be…never again in my life. But it
hurt too much to say all that.
“Just let me know if you need anything,” he said. I need a sledge hammer, I
thought, artfully leveled against my temple, so that I can sleep for the next fortyeight hours. At least I won’t hurt if I’m asleep.
No sledge hammer. No sleep. Just a long day contemplating pain, but realizing
how much we do love one another, Dad and I. It was a fact we would continue to
hold deep within, not always consciously, after the pain had passed and something like normalcy had returned. And over the years, we would reach deep inside
and retrieve that awareness when we found ourselves needing it.
RSM is privileged to have Dr. Bill
Fisher write our columns, newsletters, and economic updates. Bill
has been writing real estate and
mortgage-related materials for over
twenty years and was Broker/Owner of a successful real estate office.
Bill is also an accomplished musician, songwriter, singer and teacher/writer. His book, You Are Not a
House: How to Build Your Real
Estate Career with Passion and
Authenticity, is now available
from Trafford Press, www.Trafford.
com/06-2862 and Amazon.com.
We are delighted to showcase
another facet of this very gifted,
humorous & loving man.
WHEN TO CHANGE YOUR SLOGAN...
Over the years, we expanded our marketing services to
include well-written, high-quality monthly print newsletters and information-packed email newsletters for the use
of both sophisticated real estate and mortgage professionals.
Cultivating Client Relationships
A few years ago we realized that the services we provided
did more than just build and improve someone’s image.
We were also helping our clients stay in touch with their
clients and referral sources on a regular basis and in a very
positive way that actually cultivated and maintained those
relationships.
So we came upon a new slogan for our company—
“Cultivating Client Relationships.”This slogan actually works
for us on a couple of levels. What we offer are tools that
help our clients cultivate their existing relationships. But
our slogan is, further, a bit like a mission statement, a few
words that declare our goal of cultivating our own client
Please email Bill at
[email protected]
Continued from page 1
relationships.
One of the constant truths of our business is that the
better our clients do, the better we do. We can’t imagine a
better formula for success.
Having such a slogan helps us to live up to our business
ideal and to provide the best possible service. If, after a
time, you realize that your business model has changed
somewhat or the market has caused you to adjust, you
may want to rethink your slogan and find one that works
better today, and let yesterday’s slogan go.
We’re Here To Help
And if you’d ever like to brainstorm some ideas, or to
get advice on how to come up with your own slogan,
please don’t hesitate to call. Of course, there will be no
charge because, as Right Side Marketing’s slogan asserts,
we are “Cultivating Client Relationships” for you and for us
as well!
Right Side
Marketing
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Cultivating Client Relationships
5056 Bella Collina Street
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• 800-456-4395
• Fax: 760-630-3583
• www.rightsidemarketing.com
A
NOTHER VERY SATISFIED CLIENT
Everyone likes my Lender Letter. Every time I send it
out I get calls. People say they read it and enjoy it because it’s
user-friendly.Thank you for doing such a great job for me.
Bob Tidd, Prospect Mortgage
DO YOU USE A SLOGAN?
H
ere at Right Side Marketing, we have a passion for marketing. One of the more
creative and fun tasks you face when you develop your marketing identity is
coming up with your slogan or tag line.
Both stories this month provide you with some basics for developing your first slogan
or changing an existing one. If you would like a free consultation about your marketing
plan, please don’t hesitate to call us. We’d be happy to share our knowledge and experience with you.
In the world of real estate and lending, many of our clients are reporting a difficult but
slowly improving marketplace as investors are moving in to snatch up the incredible deals
now available as banks unload REOs. The pent-up demand for real estate transactions
seems to be moving people back into the marketplace. We hope this anecdotal evidence
is a precursor to more optimistic “official” news.
We’ll keep you posted on this. In the meantime, we hope your business is beginning
to improve as well!
&
To order Bill’s book, go to
www.Trafford.com/06-2862
or call us at 800-456-4395
INSIDE THIS
MONTH’S ISSUE:
•
Mnemonic
Masterpieces
•
When to Change
Your Slogan
•
Another Side of
Bill Fisher
•
“Guess Where
We Are Now,”
and Win
a $25 Free Lunch!