Each has its own story

Background

ERA is the largest real estate agent in Belgium and they have learned that every home has its stories about the good times and the less good times.They wanted to be the first estate agent to show that they understand the importance of these stories to people both buying and selling their homes.

Idea

Online banners and radio commercials drove traffic to a website where an online storytelling platform had been created. Here people selling their houses could write their personal stories. All the stories could be viewed and read and voted on. Every month the story with the most votes won a cost-free sale with ERA.

Stories could be searched by neighbourhood, either the postcode where you currently live or where you want to move to.

The home behind every story was pinpointed on a map.

This was Ann’s story:

Well, after years of renovating our house it's finally finished. We thought we'd live there happily ever after with our daughter and son. Unfortunately this was just a dream. In August a catastrophe hit when we lost our 13 year-old son in a car accident.  Our family is broken and there are just too much emotional baggage in our house to cope with. You take your memories everywhere, but the pictures of our son on vacation, in the tree-house he built himself, the garden... it all became just too much.

The campaign idea was extended onto Facebook, where Facebook users could visualise the stories of their homes with a LifeMapping application.

By filling in the details of all the places they had lived with as many or as few details as they wished, they could create their own personal LifeMap and plan their next move along the lifeline.

In sharing their LifeMaps with others, people were allowing their friends to discover interesting facts about where they lived, how they had nearly been neighbours once.

Results

Within days they had collected tons of stories. The most successful stories are those with an emotional drive that goes straight to the heart: a loss, a dramatic change in someone’s life, a love story, etc. And every single day, new stories pop up. Even national newspapers picked up on the action.

Our Thoughts

Many creative briefs these days have a box marked: Customer/Consumer Insight, as if insights are two a penny. Real insights are rare because they are revelations of something which is obvious once it is revealed to us but which was invisible to us before. But when a brief is written around a genuine insight, the creatives cannot help but do interesting and engaging work. I think this is an instance of that. Every single one of us has memories and dreams of the homes we have lived in – and the homes we want to live in. Tapping into that universal truth must surely touch ERA with warmth in a market where there are many players but few brands.