Recently, I’ve been digging into marketing and brand books. At the moment, I’m finishing up the excellent Brand Hijack. After reading just a bit about marketing or retail history, it starts to get difficult to go out into the American consumer world without getting that sinking feeling that you’re being manipulated every second.
Happy Holidays! (Want to Sell Your House?)
On the other hand, to use one of my favorite rhetorical tricks, you can ask the question, “has it or could it ever be different? Isn’t that just life?” Indeed!
To that end, you can imagine I had a grand old time just now when a real estate broker came to my door with a pile of business cards “just to say happy holidays.”
Of all businesses that push marketing on me, the local real estate agents and brokers are the most persistent. I live in a popular part of town, so real estate folks are eager to get in on housing sales. We’re sent all sorts of post cards and even little newsletters.
Pre-Seeding
The visitor today was just walking around and after saying “happy holidays!” asked “are there a lot of people moving into the neighborhood?” Over-thinking the encounter, this seemed to accomplish two goals:
- Gather intelligence about how sales on the street are going.
- Pre-seed the idea of me selling my house in case I hadn’t been thinking about it.
Even if I’m over-thinking this one encounter, those are certainly two nice effects of any type of marketing.
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