I recently wrote a marketing piece called Members Only – The Costco Way.
In the article I touted Costco’s extreme focus on its customer and employee satisfaction. Costco spends most of its budget buying merchandise in bulk at wholesale prices for the sole benefit of their members. By aggregating Costco members’ purchasing power, Costco is able to achieve for its members something they cannot do on their own – purchase quality goods at near wholesale prices. Costco does little formal marketing. Its success is based upon the word of mouth of satisfied Costco members.
Costco also treats their employees well. They do not have the union issues that plague WalMart because they provide generous benefits and pay substantially higher than minimum wage. Theft of merchandise by employees at Costco is also low.
By treating their customers and employees well and making them true partners in their endeavor, Costco has been rewarded by their customers with millions of referrals.
At HomeGain we believe the Costco model is worth emulating.
Like Costco, the bulk of our marketing budget goes towards acquiring traffic and leads for the exclusive benefit of our members.
We don’t attract visitors to our site off Realtor content and then send those visitors to someone else.
When we drive traffic via more than 300 affiliate partners or manage millions of key words on Google, MSN and Yahoo!, something that an individual agent could not do on her own, we do so on behalf of our thousands of agent and broker members.
We strive to provide our clients with a service that only HomeGain can provide.
HomeGain realizes that Realtors can conduct certain marketing efforts on their own, such as blogging, or running their own search engine marketing campaigns.
Therefore, HomeGain endeavors to provide either a supplement to those efforts or a respite from them.
At HomeGain we constantly ask how can we relay in words and deeds that everything we do, we do for the benefit of our members? How can we ensure that the benefits we provide to our members is of higher value than our competitors, either in terms of price or service, or both? How can we make sure that our staff treats our member in the best possible way?
We love hearing from our members, celebrating their successes and enjoy when they visit us.
Please keep us posted on your successes and let us know how we can serve you better.
This is exactly the way I look at Homegain. You are out there buying in bulk – you make a profit – but at the same time save me money.
You are a partner who supplements my own efforts.
Well said.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
The Costco business model is perfectly sound involving the community in which everyone around it are part of it. Homegain will prosper from this emulation and will make them strong.
December 14th, 2010 at 3:52 pm