Why storytelling is the key to the longevity and success of your business

Chief marketing officer of Coldwell Banker David Marine discusses the invaluable impact of custom storytelling and personal branding.

Every brand tells a story. The problem most companies have with storytelling is they put their brands as the hero and their customers as the damsel in distress who needs saving. However, the best stories use a proven storytelling technique called, “the hero’s journey.” The hero’s journey puts the hero, who seeks the help of a guide to overcome a villain or obstacle they face, at the center. Think Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz, or Star Wars. 

This perfectly mirrors the real estate market today, where the consumers are the heroes who find themselves up against a stressful and emotional process of buying or selling a home. They aren’t helpless. They are more equipped with information than ever before, but because the world of real estate is ever-evolving, they seek the help of a guide—the Coldwell Banker agent—to show them the way. 

Customization through storytelling: The key to brand success

The best things are often custom-made. Custom suits. Custom playlists. Custom menus.

Consumers love a custom experience that speaks specifically to their wants, needs, and desires. With tight competition in the real estate industry and the personal nature of homebuying and selling, storytelling is a great way to further customize the experience. It’s a way to give clients the option to choose agents that they can connect with on an emotional level and who also aligns with their goals and values during their homebuying or selling process. 

How we tell the Coldwell Banker story

Our story has evolved over the years to best meet consumer needs in a changing real estate landscape. Like most real estate companies, we started out focusing on the financial aspects of buying a home, but we quickly recognized how a home provides emotional benefits that go beyond financial returns and shifted our focus. That shift in storytelling has led to 11-plus years of advertising success, during which we’ve had the most effective advertising in the industry, according to AceMetrix. 

Recently, we saw low housing inventory as being an ongoing issue, which made us adjust our story again to get sellers off the fence and into the real estate market. This pivot to a seller-focused strategy gave birth to our innovative online feature, the Move Meter. It is a proprietary tool that evaluates a move from one place to another using various data points, including housing affordability, quality of life, job market strength, and living affordability. Research shows Americans aren’t moving on a whim, and they value data that’s specific to their experiences. This enables consumers to gain a fuller understanding of a new real estate market and helps them be the hero of their own home-buying stories.

How we enable our network to tell its story

The Coldwell Banker story spans 117 years, and as a brand, we’ve proven that it not only resonates with consumers, but it is also one that can withstand any real estate market. But empowering our offices and agents across the globe to take that story and make it their own is a whole other chapter.

What if you could take award-winning, effective creative messaging from a national brand, but then localize it to a specific target audience that’s hyper-localized to thousands of markets across the globe? That was our quest heading into 2023. 

Through a suite of technology offerings and specialized creatives, we have designed a program to automate marketing, promote services, and showcase listings, using national messaging that’s customized to the local level. One of the biggest impacts is through our custom video program, a video customization capability that enables affiliated companies to create personalized national ads and fully localized Coldwell Banker videos with imagery that appeals directly to their markets. Videos can be customized, downloaded, and shared in a matter of minutes. Now we have an entire network sharing our story not just through static assets, but through video campaigns as well. 

Our storytelling efforts don’t stop there. In fact, our annual event, the Coldwell Banker Generation Blue Experience, will have storytelling as its theme to ensure every agent who attends can walk away ready to tell their own story, the story of our brand, the story of the real estate market, and much more.

Building your story

The Coldwell Banker story started after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when a college dropout named Colbert Coldwell had a friend named Benjamin Banker, and both got into the real estate business because they saw shady deals being done by real estate agents in the aftermath of the city’s destruction. They decided to guarantee their services in writing and stand up for the consumer rather than trying to make a fast buck. One hundred and seventeen years later, that story is still being told in ways our founders never could have imagined. 

Every brand has a unique story that only they can tell. I challenge you to tell that story in unique ways, explore ways to customize it for specific audiences, and scale it across the areas you serve. 

Who will be the hero in your story?

Note: This article was supplied by Coldwell Banker.