Don’t Tell Them; Show Them!

If you know anything about BC, you probably know that we have beautiful mountains, a lot of rain, and extremely expensive real estate. And where I live in the Lower Mainland of BC, you see real-estate agents promoting their services everywhere – benches, bus stops, the sides of buses, and on garbage or recycling stations.

And virtually every advertisement says the same thing; each message is a variation of the same theme.

Trust me.

The basic idea is that we should trust them because they “sell a lot of real estate,” or they are in “the top 1% club” or my personal favourite is that they will get me “top dollar” for my home because they have “superior negotiating skills.”

They are all focused on the result. Which I guess is important, but it has not been terribly hard to sell a home in the greater Vancouver area for a very long time.

With virtually every real-estate agent saying basically the same thing, all the advertisements tend to blur together.

Then I stumbled across these ads for the Vantage Real Estate Corporation.

Instead of telling me what I can expect from working with them or why I should trust them, they show me what it would be like to work with them.

They focus more on the experience than on the result. Their aim is to build trust by showing their personality and providing prospective clients with a glimpse into what it would be like to work with them.

I have no idea whether this brand strategy is contributing to growing their business, but there is little doubt this advertising strategy is helping Vantage stand out in a crowded and mostly undifferentiated competitive landscape.