In a recent podcast, Zillow co-founder Rich Barton shared insights on successful marketing strategies on a budget, emphasizing provocation. He noted how early investor Bill Gurley encouraged the team to think without a marketing budget. This led to creative feature development and leveraging housing data for media outlets, which effectively built the brand without ad spending. The launch of Zillow's 'Zestimate' tool exemplified this approach, resulting in massive user interest. Barton believes that a provocative product can drive substantial engagement and conversation among consumers.
When you have constantly changing data that people are interested in, you can almost think about feeding that data to hungry consumers in a Bloomberg-like way.
When you have a really provocative feature that you know people are going to feel emotional about one way or the other and they're going to talk about it, you're on to something.
I'm a big believer in the product being the most important part of the marketing mix, if that makes sense to you.
This made us think a lot more creatively about the features that we built, the way we built them, and then the way we PR communicated them.
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