"The Story Seller" is the title of an article that ran in the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago. If you haven't read it, check it out--it's a nice profile of Meridith Baer whom the NYT calls the grandest of the grandes dammes of home staging.
The piece gets at the heart of good staging, and for that matter good marketing. It is all about helping the prospect envision themselves living a happy life in the home. As Baer herself puts it:
“We’re not finding the cure to cancer,” Baer says. “But we are helping people see how they’ll live in the house — where they’ll hang art, where they’ll eat. The kind of thing they’re not good at because they are finding the cure to cancer.”
Whether one is writing advertising copy, staging the home, or planning a real estate soiree, the trick of course is to understand the lifestyles, tastes, and values of your prospects and to craft experiences that satisfy these and at the same time provide a tempting aspirational tickle.
It is about crafting a compelling and pleasing story or vision into which your prospects can place themselves. Baer has taken her experience as a screenwriter doing just this and applied it to the staging of homes.
