Think Homes & Land

by Rob Wicker

Most Realtors understand the value of branding. Consumers see your name/image over and over and they become more comfortable with the idea of working with you. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, as the adage states, it breeds something more desirable—security.

But why?

There is an extremely interesting book on the current bestseller list called Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman is a Psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theories on how human beings make decisions. (At heart, we are not as rational as we’d like to believe, even in money matters.)

In the book, Kahneman states that the relationship between repetition and liking is an important biological fact, and it extends to the animal world too.

For example, to survive in a dangerous environment, animals must react cautiously to new things, because the new thing may be dangerous. As a result, when something new shows up, animals get scared and run away. The prospect of an animal surviving without this trait is not good because sooner or later a predator will arrive.

However, through repetition the fear of the “new” subsides. Repeated exposures to the “new” brings nothing bad, and the animal eventually gets the safe signal. It feels secure.

This is one of the reasons brands like Coke are so powerful. In blind taste tests, consumers don’t have a strong preference for the taste of Coke over other colas, but once a soda is identified as Coke, the preference becomes high. We feel secure with Coke because we’ve been exposed to the soda and its advertisements all of our lives.

What does this mean to you? Realtors help people buy and sell a huge financial asset. The emotion you want to elicit in your prospects and clients is security. Repetition of your name, image and services is one of the best ways to generate this sense of security. We all know agents who have built a strong personal brand, and they are usually top producers.

If you don’t have a strong personal brand, your Homes & Land Publisher is a great resource for helping you build one.