Marketing 101... What have you learned as you watched the real estate industry rotate through four cycles of boom and bust? That was my question to Tim Gallen of Gallen, Neilly & Associates last week over lunch.

Gallen's firm, based in Walnut Creek, CA (near Oakland), provides market positioning services and has represented numerous real estate clients over the years (like CB Richard Ellis, Camden Property Trust and ULI).

A journalist by training, Gallen urges companies to look through a five-year-lens and answer the basic questions -- Who, What, Where, Why and How. "Now develop your message. And remember that you need to create a view of your company appropriate to each viewer."

Of course communicating your message is a challenge in an information-soaked market. To break through the "noise" in the marketplace, you need to start a conversation with a person. And, "If you want to start a conversation, you first say, 'Hello.'"

This reminded me of the Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, which I had written about in a Dispatch four years ago (March 27, 2000). Markets are conversations that communicate "in a language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny, and often shocking. ... The human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked."

So talk to me. Where do you want to be in five years?

--Peter Pike