In real estate terms this simply means that if you tamper with your branding and advertising, even a little, fewer potential buyers will be attracted to your listings because there’s less chance that they’ll remember which brand your property is listed under, and there’s less chance they’ll be able to find the listing online.

Regardless of which product or service a company provides, smart, cut through and (most of all) consistent marketing is absolutely critical.

It’s no accident that some of the world’s best businesses not only have the best brands, but the most consistent and doggedly defended brands. It’s a rule that applies to the professional services sector as much as consumer goods. Think for a minute about which bank you use. I can guarantee that every letter, monthly statement or any marketing materials that you receive from your bank will be perfectly branded and reproduced to a very high, and highly consistent, standard.

Can you imagine an employee of a bank or a law firm sending you a letter (full of spelling mistakes) on photocopied paper instead of a perfect, original letterhead? It just wouldn’t happen, wouldn’t be allowed to happen, and for good reason.

Employees of banks, solicitors and law firms, just as much as retail outlets and consumer goods manufacturers, wouldn’t dream of taking their company’s brand into their own hands and changing it in any way, and this makes me wonder why so many real estate agents do!

I see a lot of real estate agents making the mistake of trying to differentiate themselves or, worse still, their listings from their brand. This is usually by just tweaking the layout and design of a press ad, a sign board or an online listing, changing a font here or an icon there, moving the logo. It might not seem like much, but it will eventually inflict a death by a thousand cuts to your brand and, therefore, your business and ultimately your own income stream.

The power of your brand is your best friend. Every agent should embrace the brand that they’re working under and leverage it to its full potential, not strive to differentiate from it.

Most major real estate groups will conduct regular brand surveys to gauge just how their brand is positioned into the marketplace. They are normally conducted through expensive surveys. Results often include statistics for prompted and unprompted  awareness of your brand.  Naturally these reports focus on the brand that engaged them… the group paying the bill.  They always seem to emphasise the good news and rarely position the brand to the whole industry.

One way to measure a brands effectiveness is what the public are actually searching for. Google released a product awhile back called Google Insights for Search which you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

Google Insight gives us a great way to compare the relative brand strength of different brands right around the country and even broken down into each state.  Please note that this represents how many people are searching for these names and in no way represents web traffic. Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au would win on a pure traffic count hands down but when it comes to what the public searches for they are not the number one brand in Australia.

That it turns out was Ray White and accordingly I have used them as a baseline  for this first comparison. If you want to compare another industry brand yourself that I have not included make sure you include Ray White in the website to compare, region of Australia, select 2009 and then the Real Estate Category as per this screenshot below (click to enlarge).

Google Insights for Search only allows you to do 5 searches at a time so each search was done with Ray White to keep the baseline accurate and then all results were manually collated to show us the following results.

Google Insights also lets us look at the trend for each brand. The following graphs show the change for 2009 to date in groups of 5. Each graph also has a category line for Real Estate (black line) which is a common baseline to compare them against.

Also, please note the “Totals” differ to those above because they are ranking only the brands listed and there is not common baseline used such as Ray White above. You can click on the trending graphs to view a larger version.

The last thing that Google Insights lets us have a look at for brand awareness is a breakdown to a state level. In the following examples we look at each of the brands and how they fair in each state.

The darker the colour the stronger that brand is in that state.

(edit: You should only use these to compare the strength of a brand in one state to another.  You cannot compare one brands to another brand using these maps.  See the comments below)