Book Report: Waiting On Your Cat To Bark

Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg, creators of "Persuasion Architecture", have just released a new book entitled "Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?" - "Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing"

This book brings a real world, real time, marketing perspective to the theories in my previous book reviews on the "The Long Tail" and "An Army of Davids". If you haven't had the opportunity read these two books, read this one first. When you go back to read the other two the light bulb will go off in your head so brightly, it will explode.

The first line of the book states:

"Are you waiting for your customers to respond the way they used to? Many marketers are and that's a problem. Cat's don't bark and-consumers today don't salivate on command"

As I read this book I could see parallels to the real estate industry in just about every paragraph.

While emerging media and technology undermine the effectiveness of traditional mass-marketing models, they also create unprecedented opportunity for us to redefine and profit from how we communicate with customers"

If you're still not convinced that you will need to start crafting new business models and create new ways to do business in the "experience economy" of today, this book will certainly make you think otherwise. It isn't written in an academic, business school manner. The book's concepts and theories are practical and can be applied today. The references to transparency in the transaction and the fact that consumers today demand information on their own terms and conditions is about as timely as it gets in real estate. Chapter 5 entitled "Marketers Out of Control" is a pivotal chapter in the book in my opinion. It starts out with a reprint of 20 questions asked in a blog post in 2005 by George Silverman, author of "The Secrets To Word of Mouth Marketing" These questions should and probably will make you squirm in your seat a bit. They are designed to elicit just that type of response. Newspapers, Ad agencies and purveyors of marketing/ad solutions need to think about #17 when they are approaching the real estate professional of the future: Question 17: "What if your customers made their own commercials, ads etc. and they got more exposure than your ad agency?" How about web empowered prospects (trust me, they have more arrows than a "Zestimate" in their quivers) Question 1: "What if your customers knew more about your product(s)--or, at least,the more imprint things about your product than you do?" I think it would be an excellent exercise for any broker or agent to answer all 20 questions and take action on every one of them.

This book is a good guide, at least from a marketing perspective, for what I've been speaking to in this blog over the last 3 months. There exists an outstanding opportunity for open minded, creative business people to profit from the new rules and new tools of the real estate business. After all, it's a relationship business and just about all of the new tools are built upon developing and maintaining relationships. Let the other guy wring his hands and worry about who controls what and take control of your own domain.

I owe a hat tip to Ken Brand of Prudential Gary Greene Realtors for loaning me the book. If you're thinking of starting a "pay per click" search engine campaign, buy this book first. It comes with $50 in credit toward Yahoo Search Marketing and an 80 minute free video seminar on CD. When's the last time you made money reading a book?