Inman Connect is LIVE Aug. 8-10! Join us for impactful interviews, cutting-edge conversations and networking with thousands of real estate pros. Get valuable takeaways to thrive in a rapidly shifting market. Can’t come to Vegas? Register now for a virtual ticket.
Although leaders often feel they must choose one over the other, Anywhere Brands Chief Marketing Officer Amory Wooden, Collabra Technology CEO Russ Cofano, and The Agency Chief Operating Officer Shane Farkas told the Inman Connect Las Vegas crowd there’s a way to stay true to company branding while giving agents the freedom to express themselves.
Shane Farkas
“I think properly executed brand standards can benefit everyone, and they’re also not set in stone, so they can evolve over time,” Farkas said of The Agency’s evolution over the past 12 years. “So for us, we’ve made a lot of changes to our brand standards over the years based on feedback and changes in the industry. We’ve also grown in size and geography.”
“We have an entire section of our brand guidelines around agent and team logos and branding, and then we get suggestions from the field,” he added. “So one of our new franchises wanted to change something on the side, which you might think is there’s no chance we’re going to do that, but we actually liked that idea. So we incorporated that change into the brand standards.”
Farkas said The Agency doesn’t review every piece of its agents’ digital and print advertising; however, agents do a lot of “self-policing” and are quick to flag materials that deviate from brand standards.
“If somebody is going rogue, that’s going to generally get flagged by others in the community because they value the brand so much as well,” he said. “When that happens, we’re not handing out fines. We’re meeting with that person to figure out what problem they were trying to solve.”
“Maybe it raises an awareness of something that we have that they didn’t know about, or something that we need to create,” he added. “It just goes back to how we evolve over time. And then reducing friction is also a big piece of it.”
Amory Wooden
Wooden, who oversees marketing for Century 21, ERA Real Estate and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, said reducing friction is a key goal. Providing easy-to-use templates and materials, she said, enables agents to automate marketing tasks and focus on what they do best — helping clients buy and sell homes.
“When we think about how we can help our agents, and how we can support them on a local level while also growing the brand globally, we focus more on the materials we can give them,” she said. “What are the templates? What are the pamphlets? What are the beautifully branded pieces that they can use quickly and easily, but can also be customized for their own information?”
“We do that so that they can quickly create beautiful branded pieces, and then focus on the relationships and the selling, but at the same time, we also try and educate them on the power of the brand,” she added. “We often use this African adage, which is, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone if you want to go further, go together,’ and I think branding is a really powerful thing that speaks to that. And so while we want to help them on a local level, it will help all of us go further together if we’re supporting and growing the brand overall.”
Farkas and Wooden said their respective companies have heavily invested in instant customization with plug-and-play platforms; however, offering more intensive, in-person marketing help is vital to helping agents navigate heavy-duty marketing needs.
“If they want to brand or rebrand themselves, we’ll have our in-house marketing team, which is composed of public relations, content design, really good storytellers and marketing professionals, and they’ll meet with the agent or the team,” Farkas said. “[They] figure out what their goals are with their target audiences and create variations of like a mood board and a color palette, different logo options and templates that show them how that would look alongside The Agency’s brand and produce something for them that solves their problems and helps them meet their business goals.”
Russ Cofano
Cofano lauded Farkas and Wooden’s strategies and said mass customization and personalization are key to helping agents stand out in an increasingly competitive market. The Collabra Technology CEO said his company partners with data firm Plunk to create data-based materials that position agents as the go-to expert in their market.
“We have a video creator that taps into Plunk’s [application programming interface],” he explained. “The video is branded to the brokerage company, but it’s subtle. The agent puts a ZIP code in and hits enter — the video is created, and pulls real-time data for the market that they’re in.”
“It gives them a piece at is different than anybody else’s piece. That particular asset doesn’t exist anywhere else because it pulled data at that particular time for that particular agent for that particular zip code,” he added. “Then they can share it with their social sphere. They love it.”
All three leaders said artificial intelligence will play a bigger role in brokerages’ marketing efforts, with Wooden saying brokerages can wield closed-source AI to create bespoke materials.
“What a lot of folks are talking about right now is generic, generative AI, and that comes from publicly-available open source data. It’s exciting. It’s powerful,” she said. “But what if we can get to a place where the AI isn’t learning from [an] open source, it’s learning from brand-specific data, like brand narratives, brand guidelines and brand voice? I think that could provide an opportunity to really unlock the power of AI for brands.”
Although there’s fear about AI totally replacing humans, Farkas said he sees opportunities for marketing teams to make AI another team member that can be used to fast-track tasks.
“I think we’re probably some time from AI replacing a human graphic designer, but I think we’re probably close to the point where a human graphic designer with AI will replace one without it,” he said. “I think it will ultimately create a lot of freedom because you can program in those brand standards, and therefore create an infinite number of variations, whereas the human designers are limited in time.”
Beyond creating digital and print advertising materials, Cofano said he looks forward to AI helping agents pinpoint and reach their specific audiences.
“There’s also going to be an opportunity for AI to help us understand which content should be posted, to the audience that you want to post to, at the time it should be posted,” he said. “Today, the typical thing is a company creates content, provides it to their agent, they pick the one they like, which many times isn’t necessarily one that’s going to resonate with their audience.”
“AI is going to help reverse that cycle.”
