Advertising

John Wanamaker, a US department store owner who died in 1922 is famously quoted as having said that “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. A century and a half later we are much more advanced. The back office of any website can tell you who is clicking and where they are clicking from. For example, our Westcliff, Weston super Mare website (see www.westcliffvillas.co.uk ) analysis tells us that the majority of interest is local. The next highest batch of visitors comes from the London area and the third highest batch of visitors comes from Southampton! Why Southampton? We don’t know!

Our project can also be visited at Rightmove (see:  www.rightmove.co.uk  and enter the postcode BS23 2ER). Fascinatingly, the UK’ s premier property site can tell us a lot about who is visiting. The variation in numbers of visitors from one week to the next appears to follow national trends (for example traffic is always up immediately after Christmas) and the site also enables us to compare the performance of our own properties with others in the same market.

If online advertising is so effective why are we still erecting signboards, advertising on poster sites and in magazines and newspapers? Surely these nineteenth century marketing options are anachronistic in our twenty first century age of the information super highway? Traditional advertising is certainly more expensive than the online alternatives, we cannot measure its effectiveness and it is slow and cumbersome when we want to make changes. Research tells us that the vast majority of house hunters these days turn first to the internet before hitting the road or doing the rounds of estate agents. Why then do we continue to line the pockets of media companies and estate agents? Is it fear of what might happen if we stopped advertising? Why don’t we, as developers, have the confidence to sell without agents?

Like John Wanamaker, we still don’t have all of the answers. We do know that, expensive and cumbersome as it is, we still want to advertise. We feel uncomfortable with the concept of online advertising only. We have the research at our fingertips, the willingness to invest in new development and yet we still need our agents.

Perhaps the  answer is simple. People read newspapers. We flick through the property pages whether we are buying or not. Agents are people who provide a service. They are accessible and they know what they are doing as they do it for a living!

So, as with many things in life, whilst progress has brought us more choice it has not necessarily brought with it the simplicity we purport to seek – or the complete answer to a nineteenth century dilemma!