The Dirt on Real Estate advertising.

“I can’t get no satisfaction” – Mick Jagger

A certain developer who won’t be named, at least not until someone makes it worth my while, has plastered Pune with billboards that claim ‘Satisfaction is just a word’. Two weeks later a rival builder cleverly retaliated with, ‘Satisfaction is not just a word’, in the process thoroughly confusing the local population, many of whom weren’t intending to buy a flat with either of the two developers, anyway.

Now when Pune’s home buying population is confused they dig in their heels and refuse to sign on the dotted line, so business naturally slumped. It got to such a pass that bankers stepped in to try and mediate a solution. A spokesperson for the local populace said, ‘it’s not that we’re looking for satisfaction. But to be told this to our face is just too much. Buying a flat from these guys can be so confusing it makes Einstein’s theories relatively simple. The last guy who tried to differentiate between carpet area, built-up area, super built-up area and the granddaddy of them all, saleable area needed medication and 40 hours of counselling and he still sweats nervously when any of those words are mentioned within hearing.”

The company that claimed that satisfaction was just a word defended their stance saying, ‘Well it’s perfectly obvious it’s just a word’ I mean it doesn’t really do anything does it? Just sits there waiting to be read. Which makes it a word. As opposed to say, a brick or mortar or anything else. We were merely stating the obvious. And it doesn’t have anything to do with our projects or anything. As any of our customers will tell you.

All unarguably true. But why put it up on a billboard?

“Well you could think of it as a public interest campaign, we were only doing our bit to try and educate everyone out there. Now they know that satisfaction is a word, we were planning to follow it up with an entire series: dedication, quality, armadillos, and so on.... But we’ve shelved that now.

A representative of the company that had retaliated by claiming that satisfaction wasn’t just a word, argued that if you looked carefully one would see that satisfaction wasn’t just a word – it was at least five! namely, ‘sat’, ‘is’, ‘fact’, ‘act’ and ‘ion’.

Also true.

The search for the truth finally led us to the agency that came up with the idea and the copywriter who wrote the ad said, ‘Actually that line doesn’t have anything to do with any of you at all. None of our ads do. You see, I’d just had my appraisal that day and I wasn’t quite sure whether it was satisfactory or not.” “But considering the press it has received, we’re considering sending it for the Cannes Ad Festival.”