Update: I originally wrote a much longer post, but cut a lot of it to make it more internet friendly. I unfortunately cut the part where I talked about how striking it was that only a small part of this conference was to straight marketing tricks, while a lot of it was nuts and bolts marketing that any agent really needs to succeed. What stood out is that The Purple Cow conversation was under an hour of the entire day, when it is often the substantial part of entire other conferences. I apologize if I made this sound like Ben was preaching all fluff: Ben is very much the anti-traditional real estate speaker, with a captivating, understated speaking style and real, useful tactics to help agents become better at their jobs.

Last Thursday I was a fish out of water on a Rain Camp panel hosted by Ben Kinney in Bellingham.

I left feeling exhausted and depressed. The afternoon was largely devoted to consumer-negative or neutral tactics for getting clients. Ben’s recommendations largely hinged on Seth Godin’s purple cow theory. In short, the popular understanding of the theory says that when you drive by pastures, you never remember individual cows, but if there were a purple cow in the pasture, you would not only remember it, but you would talk about it for the rest of your life. Specific purple cow marketing recommendations ranged from neon pink business cards (which reminded me of this guy) to wearing flip flops all the time. In short: be weird in your marketing.

This is not what Purple Cow marketing is supposed to be – it’s supposed to be about how you create a unique product (i.e. an unusually useful online home search product), not your marketing.

The original concept of making unusual products is good, but the Purple Cow is frankly a crappy allegory that is usually misinterpreted. Ultimately a purple cow is merely a trick. Purple cows aren’t useful and they (presumably) produce the same milk or hamburgers that black-and-white cows produce.

At the few-and-far-between real estate conferences I attend, the people on stage uniformly preach the shallowest Purple Cow interpretation possible: you must stand out physically and build a brand around being different in a functionally useless way. Do anything to be memorable as long as it doesn’t involve talking about what you actually do.

Purple Cow marketing is win-lose or win-neutral for consumers. Purple cow marketing does not help people buy the right home, avoid over-paying, get the offer in on time, or correctly answer the hundreds of questions consumers have about buying a home. This sort of gimmicky marketing is something capitalism is supposed to minimize: it is an unproductive waste of resources. It’s win-lose or win-neutral for consumers: there is nothing about their home buying experience it improves and it often obfuscates actual quality of service. Consumers would be much better off if agents spent their time and energy working on behalf of their clients.

Imagine what the real estate industry would be like if agents and brokers took half of time and money they devote to marketing – including the lectures and clubs – and spent that time and effort improving their actual service: knowing every nook and cranny of the inventory (on and off market), knowing home pricing, bringing in the best staging and photography pros for their clients, and being highly responsive.

My other beef with Purple Cow marketing is personal: as a consumer, it turns me off. Sales people who employ tricks make me feel gross. Here’s why: sales tricks indicate two things:

1. You don’t believe your knowledge or skills are better in any way than your competition, so you have to resort to tricks to get clients.
2. You don’t believe your knowledge or skills can be differentiated in any meaningful way, so you aren’t investing in them.

The original promise of the internet was to create a landscape where quality bubbled up. Free information was supposed to render marketing tricks useless. And it has lived up to the promise in many industries, but in the real estate industry the internet has actually  rewarded fluff over substance and has actually undermined the historical importance of quality service and personal referrals for finding real estate agents. It’s a trend that we aim to reverse, starting by putting with our current search product which contains as much MLS data as we are allowed to show, all for free with no registration.