If we’re not adapting to buyer self-interest, then whose self-interest is guiding our advertising?
Unless we as the advertiser is also the one buying our services or assets, why should we expect that strategy to work?
Then, I started thinking about the auction industry I serve. I don’t have enough fingers to count the times a client has tried a project I’ve wondered if they should’ve declined. Those are the times when I get this phone call or email: “Hey, I’ve got this auction. I’ve never sold one of these before. How would you market it?” They’re hoping I’ve helped another auction company sell something similar.
I hope that wonder leads you where it leads me. If it doesn’t, I’d really love to know where it does lead you and how it inspires you.
One interesting thing about the Transaereo: it was designed without a rudder. Caproni thought that the pitot could create the same steering input by varying the action of the three columns of wings. I find a lot of small businesses like Biplane Productions used to be: rudderless, grabbing any updraft it can and taking it where it leads. For me, though, that led to an unstable, unsustainable flight. The business slowly gained altitude, but it was a fight.
If you can’t prove any of these competitive advantages, be ready to offer your services for a lower commission—or to take the auctions your competition isn’t fighting to get. If you can’t answer these two primary questions, you might want to brush up on your answers to different questions—the kind employers commonly ask during job interviews.
In the current marketplace, there’s no excuse for relying on instinct. Our marketing mix should include more experimentation and less guesswork. Our customers on the aggregate are telling us how and where and when to advertise and conduct transactions. The buying public is always right, whether we like it or not; and they’re generating the data to prove it.
If you’ve not been segmenting, start now. Other marketers have a head start on you. Other auction companies are already using this tool for years. Start gathering data now so that you’ll be more competitive a year from now and have more marketing choices.
If you’re living up to your mission, you don’t have to tell people. If you’re not consistently hitting those goals, why create expectations in the marketplace that you can’t meet? If, like many firms, you’re filling that part of the business plan outline with mushy cliches that give you a lot of leeway, what are you communicating with those vapid words?
Their service is super simple: upload the clips you recorded into their site, type in some direction as to what you’d like the finished product to be, select how long you want the finished video to run, key in your credit card information, and then wait for the link to their finished product. You can also choose upgrades like expedited editing and even a 15-second teaser video to use for Instagram and other social media.
The interesting thing is that it doesn’t take much more time to use the above principles than not to use them. What they do require is courage to move away from auction industry standards toward communication principles proven to be more attractive and effective in the marketplace. It’s not about creativity—at least not in my daily work.
Facebook isn’t the first company to offer this demographic extrapolation and replication service. They are, however, the first to do it for free. Also, with more than a decade of consumer data and more than a billion users, they have more datapoint to use for comparison.
The irony is that Bonhams showed more restraint for expensive items than we often do with much lesser lots. Maybe it’s not ironic, since most of us sell utilitarian items instead of luxury goods. Regardless, while it’s impractical for most auctioneers to put these principles in action to the degree Bonhams did, we can all move in these directions for advertising that competes in the marketplace—not just in the auction industry.
The difference between wholesale and retail prices should be enough incentive to investigate changes to our workflow, terms, and marketing. Your path to consumer-driven prices might be on very different paths than these five options. That’s okay. What’s important is that we’re interacting with the marketplace, evaluating our processes based on the feedback we gather, and then making changes to our practices to adapt.
I hate taking auctioneer’s misdirected money. I typically don’t up-sell. In fact, my clients will tell you that I often advise against extraneous media. That said, I regularly accept paychecks to build ineffective proposals. It’s true. Sure, they will represent aesthetic upgrades from their old materials; but the final product doesn’t always have my confidence
You can have hundreds of people click to your website from your email blast or thousands from social media. If the only people who show up at your auction are the ones who saw the sign, though, that traffic is empty. If your YouTube video went viral or your phones have been ringing off the hook from a press release that’s hit all of the local news, but most of your bidders all brought your direct mail piece to the auction, then the buzz didn’t bring you buyers.
The hardest part, though, is making changes in our company culture, business practices, and auction terms to remedy those stigmas and barriers. You might lose some of your faithful. You will definitely lose time and money—at least in the beginning. You might be criticized by your peers. At the same time, you might build an organization that becomes a model that others study for their own growth strategies.
The auction industry has a similar stigma to that of the sport of parachuting. Both are seen as risky business to the uninitiated and inexperienced.
I’ve bumped into multiple auction companies that tout their decades-old prospect list or the quantity of people on their in-house list. It’s an odd boast, since those lists are filled with budget-sucking ghosts. The age of a list isn’t inherently bad, but it can contribute to the following four issues most auctioneers face with their in-house database.
I’m not trying to make the case that auctioneers should use repurposed cardboard to promote their auctions and their businesses. It’s just that we would all benefit from more succinct, more candid, and more restrained advertising media.
No small business can afford this level of celebrity endorsement, but many use this marketing approach at a much smaller scale. Regardless of the number of zeroes in the deal, the same rules of engagement apply. These five celebrity criteria should be true, if you want endorsement deals to work for your brand.
