This is not the blog post I’d planned to write today.

Originally I’d scheduled myself to write about email marketing in your real estate business. My outline contained four big points that likely would have required close to 1,500 words to articulate the right, juicy way (you know me).

Then I had a surprise exchange with a Realtor who has followed our studio for ages, and now has questions about our rebrand process.

About halfway through our phone chat, she laughed and said:

“Now I gotta tell you, Caroline. My FAVORITE case study from your studio is actually not one shown on your Portfolio page. It’s what you made for Matthew McConaughey.”

Alright, alright, alright! Talk about a throwback.

I am now ditching my scheduled missive on real estate email marketing to talk about something endlessly sexier —

Matthew McConaughey’s real estate brand.

If you’ve been in our studio world for a good while, then you’ll also recall that a couple years back, we “launched” Dallas Buyers Club Real Estate.

It looks like this:

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Yes, we have a long and childishly giddy history of branding celebrities as Realtors.

Some folks have complimented us on the genius marketing strategy of doing this. I can assure you that it is, regrettably, not this tactical.

Basically every so often, I get weirdly imaginative and angsty at my desk, then stop everything to ask myself:

“What would I create in this moment if I had no restraints, no politics, no legacy baggage, and a few million dollars to turn some of my favorite famous humans into real estate brands?”

Then I pick a celebrity and unleash the unexpected.

Turns out the exercise is always as creatively therapeutic for me as it is fun for you all.

For instance, Taylor Swift’s real estate brand is built on reputation. Everything about her dramatically minimal aesthetic is about doing less, but together.

Selena Gomez’s galvanizing story is about the buying and selling journey as the power of choice, while feeling safe in your own skin at every transaction turn.

Meghan Trainor, LA’s fluffy-retro-jacket everygirl, is an evangelist for marketing like a bright melody and no apologies.

Then we have Matthew McConaughey, whose real estate brand has consistently been named by our audience as a fan favorite of this “celebrity Realtor” series.

As my agent friend and I chuckled over Matthew’s brand this morning, we landed on a little gold nugget truth that I find noteworthy today…

We don’t just love Dallas Buyers Club Real Estate because it’s (ahem) clever.

It’s because we love a brand that cops an attitude.

 Yet somehow we miss attitude all the time in our own companies, as brands.

Probably because copping an attitude feels like a naked act.

It’s stepping out on a limb to strip back the marketing conventions of your industry and show us something that is so uniquely and vulnerably you, no one else can own it…and that’s hellishly polarizing.

Your attitude may ignite our kindred spirits, or confirm to us that “Eh, nah. This is not the the agent I want to work with, after all.”

So really, attitude is as nervous-making as it is powerful. But it IS a positioning hack in and of itself, because it’s related to perspective.

Perspective is your overarching belief about how real estate should be done.

Attitude is the tone of voice you use to express that overarching belief.

Back to McConaughey as a Realtor with something to say. It’s not his years in business, awards earned or shiny service offerings we notice about his brand —

It’s the way Matthew lets Matthew be Matthew. Appropriately warm and charming, rugged yet romantic.

That’s slam-dunk tone of voice, right there. The Dallas Buyers Club attitude is the “way” Matthew does things, and it’s THE confidence magnet that draws us all in.

The beauty of copping an attitude in your brand is that there’s nothing surface or marketing-gimmicky about it —

Instead, brand attitude can act as a prism, transforming abstract concepts about your “vision and values” into a concrete point of view that people fall in love with.

I truly can’t even define it more than this, other than to encourage you to return to your favorite brands of all time and ask yourself, “Why does this make me feel something?”

We all know brands we love to binge.

The brands who when they publish something — whether it be a piece of written thought leadership or a ridiculous meme on Instagram — we’ll stop to take it in, more for the sheer delight or boldness of what’s being said than for the subject matter itself.

This is me with the Oatly brand.

Oatly calls itself as a company with “some pretty strong opinions.” I am obsessed with every single one of their opinions, which is impressive, considering that I I do not drink oat milk.

Oatly is just impossible to ignore.

Their humor marketing and surprising transparency. The bravery of their outlandish, signature run-on sentences that often are there solely to fill a blank space.

I was reminded of my Oatly marketing envy last week when I was in Seattle, helping care for my sister, Elise, who was recently diagnosed with leukemia and is recovering from her first round of chemo.

Elise drinks oat milk in her morning coffee. Every day at around 7:30 AM, I made coffee for us both, opening the fridge to reach for my carton of half n’ half and Elise’s carton of Oatly.

In case you don’t know, Oatly’s milks come in muted gray + blue + brown containers. This would classify as drab if not for the rambling copy covering the packaging like a freaking word rash.

The left side of the carton reads:

“Before we wrote this sentence, there was a lot of empty space on the side of this package and we didn’t know what to do with it really so we just started writing this sentence and then continued writing more until we had written enough words in this space that there was no more space left to write any more and now it looks like a much better package but unfortunately you have been granted nothing of value to read.”

The icing on Oatly’s creative branding cake is its tagline: “Wow No Cow.”

Not only is that language far more interesting than slapping “dairy-free” on the carton, it’s an unconventional, un-ignorable bid for memorability.

Consider Oatly’s now much-beloved Instagram reel, wherein an older gentleman plays a song called “Wow No Cow” on the recorder, a line of Irish dancers behind him. He can also be seen singing said song in the streets of Dublin.

How strange. How wonderful.

In a brand world that could not be more boring (it’s MILK), talk about a company daring to disrupt the status quo.

My point?

Whether it’s Oatly and its Irish prancers and long-winded blocks of carton copy nonsense…

Or Matthew McConaughey embracing the sweet and the sexy, giving us something specifically attention-grabbing about himself to love in our fictitious real estate brand for him…

Copping an attitude IS a legitimate brand positioning hack.

In my line of work, I’ve seen that even the most poorly positioned real estate firms out there can still succeed on the brand side, if their attitude is powerful and specific enough.

As a factor in and of itself, attitude is certainly not a brand strategy; don’t go building your business around it.

But it’s so fool-proof in its magnetism that it must be acknowledged as a meaningful player.

If you have a compelling attitude, you cannot help but draw others to you.

Granted, today I invoked a fake real estate brand made for a hot Texas actor to illustrate my point, and that’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, I’ll admit.

But the point remains.

Gone are the days of differentiating yourself in real estate on the basis of your service alone.

Instead, connecting your unifying company themes of attitude and perspective, communicated through the lens of core values, is how you build a name for yourself.

Attitude helps pluck you from the sea of agent sameness. 

It sells your work for you.

So every time you’re feeling small and confused and resigned to doing the brand things that feel safe —

Oatly yourself into some unexpected surprises.

McConaughey yourself into meaningful brand action.

Have fun with it.

Spread a tone of voice that’s clear-eyed and infectious.

And remember that the best part about going off-script in your real estate brand?

Is that you get to write the new chapter however you want.

Cheers to your brave and better Realtor brand stories —

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P.S – What’s BLUEPRINT, again? 

We’re a gaggle of designers, writers, and creatives on a mission to change the branding narrative in real estate.

We offer a signature branding service and the industry’s most elegant and high-converting digital products to help modern, stylish Realtors do three things:

➝ Communicate their worth;

➝ Become the obvious choice;

➝ Tell the right stories to stand out + SELL more.

We love new friends, so hop on our email list for more value content, take our wildly popular real estate personality quiz, or follow us on The ‘Gram to join the family.