MP: CENTURY 21 has sponsored or advertised at several high-profile events. How does that strategy benefit your brokers and agents?
RD: Our marketing initiatives benefit our brokers and agents in several areas. For brokers, we leverage our advertising and sponsorships with such high-profile events as the Super Bowl and U.S. Soccer to develop and deliver business generation tactics that our franchisees may activate on the local level. For instance, through our partnership as the official real estate company of U.S. Soccer, we have developed a “Go Out and List” or GOAL campaign to inspire competition among the agents within each office to capture more listings. We also enable our brokers to leverage public relations by providing them with local news release templates that capitalize on fun survey data that we release.
For agents, the ability to use “The Official Real Estate Company of U.S. Soccer” on their marketing collateral material opens the door to conversations with soccer moms and dads across America. We also encourage our associates to host Super Bowl parties where our commercials can become topics of conversation among guests. This is yet one more way we deliver value to our System members.
For the Indianapolis 500, we leveraged our relationship with Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing and its driver, Josef Newgarden, to make an appearance at our Indiana Broker Rally held at the Dallara IndyCar Factory and promoted this campaign through our social media channels. The No. 21 car was showcased in our booth at the 2013 ICSC Recon Convention in Las Vegas in May. This type of “SMARTER. BOLDER. FASTER.®” marketing is very appealing to consumers and highly impactful for industry professionals and entrepreneurs.
The IndyRacing sponsorship also enabled us to raise a significant amount of money for Easter Seals, our philanthropic partner, by providing brokers and agents the ability to purchase race-day tickets for our corporate suite by contributing through our Indy 500 Easter Seals Champions fundraising page.
