Michael Fischer
Chief Marketing Officer, Coldwell Banker

Michael Fischer joined Coldwell Banker Real Estate as Chief Marketing Officer in February 2008 after 16 years at Nissan Infiniti. As CMO, Fischer is responsible for all national marketing efforts for the Coldwell Banker Real Estate brand in the U.S. and Canada. Those duties include all branding web platforms, such as the company's consumer and intranet websites, mobile and social presences, and its "On Location" YouTube channel. He is also responsible for all online and offline consumer advertising, agent recruiting, and public relations.

Q&A

As a global company, how does Coldwell Banker Real Estate focus on localizing its marketing strategies?

With more than 89,000 sales associates and brokers in nearly 50 countries, Coldwell Banker Real Estate maintains a national and global presence. Real estate, however, is an extremely local business. What’s happening in the Las Vegas housing market varies drastically from what’s happening in Connecticut, Florida, or elsewhere. Therefore, as Coldwell Banker Real Estate develops the company’s overarching corporate marketing strategy, each element of the campaigns must be adaptable for individual local markets to reach consumers in a meaningful way. While we have to do a national blanketing of brand awareness and messaging, we’re finding more and more that we need to create content that can be used locally.

What digital channels and platforms are being used by Coldwell Banker to reach its audience effectively?

The most efficient and effective way to create this flexibility is through online, digital, and social tools. While the real estate market long depended on print advertising and listings, now the industry is quickly walking away from the medium. With new properties constantly coming on the market or being revalued and re-priced, print listings are quickly out of date. Citing a recent article on real estate's evolving marketing channels, "Would you eat a five day old piece of sushi? The answer is no. Why, then, would you look in the newspaper for a five-day-old property listing? [Real estate] is too dynamic an industry."

Fortunately for Coldwell Banker Real Estate, the company is well positioned in the digital space and has agents and brokers that are very tech-savvy. Most of Coldwell’s agents were early adopters of social media and developing their own web presence, blogging, and participating in local online real estate conversations. This allows our corporate marketing team to distribute national marketing content and let individual brokers provide a local spin that resonates more in their direct communities.

Another key tool for Coldwell Banker Real Estate has been its investment and use of online video content. The company created its own “On Location” YouTube channel; customers can search for video content specific to their geographic markets. More than 70,000 videos have been uploaded that feature individual properties, agent profiles, and communities, all generated from local Coldwell Banker companies or agents and all very specific to what those brokers are trying to communicate.

What prevalent challenges has Coldwell Banker assessed in its process of localizing its global reach?

Empowering brokers to localize Coldwell Banker marketing content has become a powerful tool, but it also makes maintaining brand consistency more difficult. While the localized content produces higher quality listings and photography, extra steps are needed to ensure agents understand the company’s national messaging and how to appropriately adapt it. The consumer can’t get a fragmented idea of what Coldwell Banker is all about. We need to deliver a very specific and consistent voice in the market.

To combat this challenge, Coldwell Banker Real Estate holds local events around the country to reiterate the national marketing initiatives and campaigns to agents. Last year, I attended 40 events where I spoke in front of 10,000-12,000 agents—approximately 15 percent of the brand’s total network. My main focus was always the messaging and delivering a consistent voice to consumers.

Ensuring Coldwell Banker agents put this message into practice is another challenge, so our marketing team has developed a thorough data warehouse and metrics system to track campaigns and measure their effectiveness. In addition to linking each campaign into the system, the tool also has a local company lead management network to follow lead conversions and local performance. With this thorough measurement and analysis, in addition to the localized approach to marketing content, Coldwell Banker agents are converting a significantly higher rate of their qualified leads.

Moving forward, what best practices can you advise to best streamline marketing strategy and performance?

As the entire real estate market embraces digital and online tools for listings and other elements of their marketing mix, simply shifting property listings to the Internet is no longer enough. Instead, real estate companies need to go where their customers are and deliver the content that fits their interests and needs.

Right now, information is anywhere and everywhere on the Internet. But how do I help our customers get some perspective on all the information they’re getting? Our shift to creating local content that focuses on individual agents is really in tone with what’s going on in the market.

Terry J. Soto

President & Chief Executive Officer, About Marketing Solutions, Inc.

Soto is President and CEO of About Marketing Solutions, Inc., a Burbank, California–based strategy consulting firm specializing in the U.S. Hispanic market. She helps Fortune 500 companies achieve transformative business-ready positions to leverage the Hispanic market for total market growth. Prior to founding About Marketing Solutions in 2001, Soto was Managing Partner/VP of Strategy and Client Services at cruz/kravetz:IDEAS, where she planned and implemented Hispanic marketing strategies and communications campaigns. Soto speaks across the country on the business readiness and marketing strategy frameworks she uses in her consulting work to help companies create enduring and growth-oriented Hispanic market business strategies. She is the author of the industry standard book, Marketing to Hispanics: A Strategic Approach to Assessing and Planning Your Initiative and co-author of Grow with America: Best Practices in Ethnic Marketing and Merchandising. Contact Terry at 818-842-9688 or by email at terry@aboutmarketingsolutions.com.

When Hispanic Marketing Is Not Enough
By Terry J. Soto

Has Hispanic marketing really advanced in the past 20 years? Or, does it feel like we’re in a time warp? And more importantly, are companies really seeing the growth that matters most to their leadership?

Sure, there are many more internal experts inside the walls of corporate America. They all have the deep consumer insights. And, they certainly have the reach vehicles and a myriad of marketing properties from which to choose. And yet, Hispanic marketing spend remains an “expendable” expense representing only 1.2% of the $325 billion spent on advertising.

Could it be that Hispanic marketing is still managed as an afterthought? Could it be that corporate America still makes minimal efforts to organize internally to define “the how” of aligning back and front end operations to capture Hispanics’ contribution across their stated growth platforms? Could it be that Hispanic marketing is still driven by an industry which has an almost exclusively external marketing focus?

We talk endlessly about the Hispanic market’s size, its language preferences, the deep and multi-segmented insights, the culture, and the “right media spend,” whatever that means. And, we continue to live in a Hispanic marketing world of soccer sponsorships, celebrities, concerts and festivals, media properties, in-language and in-culture creative and a host of other above- and below-the-line investments which seldom tie back to corporate growth platforms.

Let’s face it; internally and externally, we aren’t doing a good job of thinking and talking business first and marketing second. We complain about not being invited to sit at the “adult strategy table” to participate in the big conversations, but have yet to elevate “our talk” to the required levels – the levels that track with industry threats and big picture direction setting. And we aren’t having the conversations about using our deep market insights to help organizations become business ready to leverage company assets to their fullest potential.

As a result, we perpetuate a view of the Hispanic market as a separate endeavor and as the end in and of itself. Two problems arise from this approach – the first is the inability to attribute any portion of top and bottom line strategic growth to the Hispanic market. And second, we can’t justify the value of our existing efforts because they are irrelevant to the focal points companies have set for growth.

We know too well the importance of being relevant, of speaking your audience’s language and of connecting with our consumer. However, we ignore these principles when it comes to the boardroom and the C-Suite where these principles should matter most to us. We ignore the premise that getting into any human being’s head means getting into their world in a credible and meaningful way.

If we are to advance Hispanic market strategy as an investment-worthy growth driver, we need to grow competent about the issues and solutions being addressed at the top. What we hear must become our compass. The consumer insights we speak to must be in this context. The market’s relevance and value as an investment will come from our ability to position the Hispanic market as a catalyst to relevantly operationalizing corporate America’s growth platforms.

We must elevate our thinking. If we expect corporate America to “walk the talk,” we must be prepared to talk their talk – and to help them take more productive steps.

Thomas Kalil

Thomas Kalil is currently serving as the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and is the Senior Advisor for Science, Technology, and Innovation for the National Economic Council. Prior to joining the White House, he was a trade specialist at the Washington offices of Dewey Ballantine, where he represented the Semiconductor Industry Association on U.S.-Japan trade issues and technology policy. He also served as the principal staffer to Gordon Moore in his capacity as Chair of the SIA Technology Committee. He is the author of articles and op-eds on S&T policy, the use of prizes as a tool for stimulating innovation, nanotechnology, nuclear strategy, newborn health, vaccines, the impact of mobile communications in developing countries, U.S.-Japan trade negotiations, U.S.-Japan cooperation in science and technology, the National Information Infrastructure, distributed learning, and electronic commerce.

Prizes: A Powerful Tool for Solving Important Problems

In recent years, there has been a renaissance in incentive prizes, which reward and recognize teams for realizing remarkable goals, achievements, or research breakthroughs. Sponsoring brands and companies have become particularly adept and adroit in using this crowd-sourced innovation approach to acquire intellectual capital, demonstrate social responsibility, and grow their businesses.

The Ansari X Prize, for example, provided a purse of $10 million for the first team to fly a reusable, privately built spaceship to an altitude of 100 kilometers twice in one week. Progressive Insurance and the Department of Energy supported the $10 million Automotive X Prize, which was awarded to three teams that built super-fuel-efficient cars that were also safe, affordable, and desirable. The Heritage Provider Network is collaborating with a start-up called Kaggle to offer a $3 million prize to improve healthcare. Using historical patient data, contestants will develop algorithms to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation is harnessing InnoCentive’s platform for open innovation to discover a form of insulin that would work only when a patient with diabetes needs it.

As the Wall Street Journal recently concluded, “these prizes have proliferated because they actually work.” Under the right circumstances, a well-designed prize or challenge can allow the sponsor of a prize to:

• Establish a bold and important goal without having to choose the path or team that is most likely to succeed
• Pay only for results
• Attract new entrants, such as small entrepreneurial firms and independent inventors
• Stimulate private-sector investment that, in many instances, turns out to be larger than the size of the purse
• Capture the public’s imagination and change its perception of what is possible

In September 2010, the White House and the General Services Administration launched Challenge.gov, a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs, innovators, and citizen solvers can compete for prestige and prizes by submitting novel solutions to important national problems. By posting challenges on this site, agencies have spurred innovation in cancer prevention, personal health records, cyber-security, sustainable aviation, and intelligent transportation.

In January 2011, President Obama signed the America COMPETES legislation, which gives all federal agencies the authority to sponsor prizes of up to $50 million. Agencies are specifically authorized to partner with private-sector and non-profit organizations to sponsor and manage prizes.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is very interested in working with leading companies, philanthropists, and non-profits to make the most of this powerful new tool for problem-solving and promoting innovation.

I believe there are several next steps that could build on the progress that has been made to date and increase the number of collaborations between the public and private sectors.

First, the growing number of companies that have been experimenting with prizes, challenges, and other forms of open information could share experiences and identify promising practices. For example, GE has been sponsoring challenges through Ecomagination in areas such as the smart grid and home energy use. Google is supporting the $30 million Lunar X Prize for the first privately funded team to safely land a robot on the surface of the moon, have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send video images and data back to Earth. PayPal is using TopCoder to encourage developers to conceive, design, and build applications that take advantage of its global payments platform. A "community of practice" interested in improving the ability of the private sector to use prizes could build on previous work, such as a seminal study by McKinsey, rapidly growing academic literature from experts such as Harvard’s Karim Lakhani, and the expertise of firms and non-profit organizations that have been involved in designing and managing prizes. This community of practice could also help document the many benefits of prizes, including positive publicity, employee morale, and the identification of innovations that are critical to a firm’s existing or emerging business.

Second, some companies may be interested in sponsoring prizes that address the grand challenges of the 21st century, such as developing clean sources of energy that are cheaper than coal, creating educational software that is as effective as a personal tutor and as engaging as the best video game, and lowering healthcare costs while enabling Americans to lead longer, healthier lives. In some cases, federal agencies may be interested in partnering with the private sector to help support and launch these prizes and to take advantage of the most promising innovations identified by the competitions. I believe there is a compelling case for increased use of prizes and challenges by both the public and private sectors, as well as many opportunities for high-impact collaborations among government, industry, and philanthropists. If you are interested in exploring this issue further, please send us a note at prizes@ostp.gov.

Thomas Kalil is Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.