“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
– Steuart Henderson Britt
Does this hit home a little bit?
It should. The country is in an affordable housing crisis: Housing has never been LESS affordable than it is now, and young Americans have never been further from the American Dream of owning their own home.
There’s a housing affordability problem, we have the solution, so homes should be flying off the shelves. But they’re not. The industry is growing a little, sure, but we should be exploding. We’re the only game in town selling water in the desert, so we should be growing exponentially. But we’re not. Why?
We’re not setting record numbers because we’re not shining a light on ourselves – we’re winking in the dark. The prime demographic for manufactured home buyers, (25-40 years old, $50-$75k annual income) doesn’t know we exist. And they will never know about us if we don’t tell them. To sell more, we have to create more awareness of manufactured housing.
Creating product awareness can be both simple and complex at the same time. It’s simple because you don’t have to sell anything – you just need to get the product in front of your target audience and make it look interesting or appealing. However, it’s complex because you’re going to have to justify to yourself that you’re putting resources into advertising that won’t generate leads or pay off in the short term. Product awareness advertising is not a sales pitch – it’s the long game.
The goal of product awareness is to simply put a product in front of your target audience to make them aware of, and subsequently interested in, that particular product. You want to create a good feeling, not a sale. That feeling then creates demand, and from the demand comes more sales.
Here are some great examples of successful product awareness campaigns with which you’re probably familiar:
Maverick’s Ray Bans
Did you know that Ray Ban’s aviator sunglasses saw a 40% increase in sales in the 1980’s after the release of the original Top Gun? Even though Maverick NEVER turned to the camera and said, “Ray Bans look great and are a great price. Go buy some today.”
Wannabe flyboys didn’t need to be told to go off and buy some aviators. The product and brand awareness from the film created the demand. And from that demand came a lot of sales.
Do you see any copy in this ad instructing the reader to buy a coke? Nope. It’s just a nice looking bear smiling about his cold, bubbly coke in a bottle. What’s not to like?
This is another great example of creating awareness of a product. Coca-cola ran the first polar bear ad in 1922, in a time when most people knew little to nothing of polar bears. The polar beat itself was a novelty, so it drew the viewer’s attention.
EVeryone vs Tesla
Have you ever heard of Elon Musk? I have too! That’s what this ad is banking on. It’s using the name recognition of Musk to get the viewer’s attention, and implying that Hyundai has ‘one upped’ Tesla, and it is Tesla’s turn to respond. It never explicitly says that this particular vehicle is better than a Tesla, but it certainly implies it.
This ad uses the brand recognition of Elon Musk to get your attention, then piques your interest by challenging him. Some brands hide from the 500 lbs gorilla in the room, but in this case, Hyundai is challenging him.
“But David…
Manufactured housing isn’t exciting like soda, sunglasses, or cars. We’re not going to be able to generate excitement like those products can.”
If I had dollar for every time someone in our industry blamed their inability to innovate and grow on the product not being exciting, I’d have several fistfuls of dollars.
Let’s say the naysayers are right, and manufactured homes aren’t super exciting. Do you know what REALLY isn’t exciting? Water. It has no taste. It has no smell. And it has no color. It’s free in most establishments, and if you’re at home, it’s almost free from the tap. Is there anything more boring than water? I don’t think so.
Yet one company has figured out how to make it exciting. So exciting that their sales have grown from $10 million to $263 million in just 3 years.
Check this out:
This is an ad for Liquid Death, a canned water company that was founded in 2019 with the promise to help “murder your thirst.” They are an absolute marketing machine. They took a boring product, water, created excitement with a unique marketing approach, and have become wildly successful. In just four years, they’ve gone from $0 to $263 million in sales, with no signs of slowing down.
The point here is that every product can be boring, and every product can be exciting. It’s up to the brand to generate awareness and excitement, and then the sales will follow. There is no reason that we can’t create more awareness and more excitement in regard to manufactured housing. And when we do, growth will follow.
Manufactured Housing Awareness
So how do we create awareness for our product, manufactured homes? How do we show the average American home buyer that a manufactured homes is a better value, and oftentimes a better product, than the site built home they’re considering?
The first step is to get them into a manufactured home. Most American have never been in one, so we have to fix that first. You can do that one of two ways – take the home to where the buyers are, or get the buyers to where the home is. I’m going to give an example of a way to do either:
1. How to get the manufactured home to them
Here’s some good news: manufactured homes are on wheels, so we can take them places. To figure where to take them, think about where a large group of your potential buyers may be. It could be a fair, a concert, a community event, or a parade.
Personally, I’ve always thought local Christmas parades would be a tremendous opportunity to promote manufactured homes. You’ve got a lot of people, families especially, watching as different floats go by. And a house goes PERFECTLY with the Christmas theme. Dress up your GM as Santa or Mrs. Claus, put him or her up on the roof, and decorate the exterior with lights. Have all your salespeople hang out the windows throwing candy for the kids. Throw a big, red light on the front of the toter that looks like Rudolph’s nose, and you’re ready to create some awareness at Christmas time. If you do it right, you’ll have the number one float in the parade.
And everyone will remember it.
2. How to get them to the manufactured homes
Don’t feel like being in a parade? Not a problem. If you can’t get the home to them, let’s get people to your homes.
The best method I’ve seen for getting new people to your lot is to partner with a charity to hold some sort of dining event – a bar b q, for example. The business provides the food, the venue, the tables, chairs, silverware, etc., and the charity provides the people to work the event. There is a nominal charge for the food, and the charity gets to keep all the revenue from the event. This works out well for the charity, because charities typically have plenty of volunteers, but they’re always looking for funds with which to do their work. The retailer gets exposure (awareness), and the charity raises some money. Everyone wins.
As the retailer, you would provide everything to get the event up and running, get some entertainment, and really create a fun event at your sales center. You would also have homes open to the public for viewing. You could even have refreshments available in one home, deserts in another, then maybe some give aways in another. This would get people moving through the homes without any sales pressure. Remember – the event is not to sell anything, it is to create awareness in your community.
To promote the event, ask the charity to get the word out in their network. More people means more revenue for them, so they will work hard to get as many people there as they can.
These are just two ways to increase awareness in your communities, and there are many, many others. If we’re going to grow this industry, we have to stop winking in the dark and turn on the light so that home buyers can see how valuable and amazing our homes are.