Web3 Supercharges Brands through Ownership
Big and Small brands level up with Web3 through Ownership
TLDR:
Brands give people a way to associate emotions and stories with a set of products and services
Owning something from a brand makes you feel more connected to it
Web3 empowers brands to connect with customers through ownership of digital goods
Firstly, what is a brand?
A “Brand” is defined in the Oxford dictionary as: A type of product, service, etc. made or offered by a particular company under a particular name.
Another more historical definition also from the Oxford dictionary shows how old and raw the concept of branding is: A mark made with a piece of hot metal, especially on farm animals to show who owns them.
Branding associates a single name, image and narrative to a set of products and services where we create an association between one-to-many, and in the most extreme and historical case this is done by even etching the brand into animal flesh.
Branding is a powerful concept.
Over the years Marketers have learned better and better ways to leverage brands and IP, and associate positive emotions towards brands so that consumers will go out and buy more products and services from that brand.
When I go out and buy a Coca-Cola I subconsciously think of all the positive emotions associated with the happy people I’ve seen drinking them in adverts, and that classic image of Santa Claus happily drinking his bottle of the fizzy dark liquid at Christmas.
Coca-Cola understands that if I’m happy buying their drink then I’ll probably repeat buy later and they can build a long-lasting sustainable business around it.
Brands can be smaller though, your favourite music artist is a Personal Brand in himself. If you like a Rapper like Drake you may keep streaming his music because you enjoy it and in the process create a relationship with the image and narrative he’s built around himself. You may even go out to buy a t-shirt or physical merch of his because you feel his brand represents you somehow.
Ownership and Brands
A key part of that feeling that makes you like and associate with the brand is the genuine act of owning the product you bought.
While I could listen to Drake’s raps and like him a lot, a true fan of his will go the extra mile by buying physical items that him and his brand have created. It might be the physical merch like a t-shirt, or maybe even a CD of his music that I could just as easily have streamed.
The simple fact that I’ve bought and now “own” something from that brand makes me feel more connected to it. Brands can make more money and make you more loyal by simply selling you more brand-associated items that when you “own” you’ll like them more for, and then you’ll buy even more from the brand later.
Growing brands by selling physical products is a well understood concept. For example limited edition items are a well known play that go directly into our deeper animal brain’s value of scarcity. When something is more scarce we value it more. It also goes into this primal notion of collecting, as people like to collect items they perceive to be valuable.
This is why for example Supreme or Chanel can keep selling their limited edition trainers and perfume, and each time get more people engaged with their brand and grow the perceived value of their brand further and further.
A rich appreciator of fine art might buy a unique piece from Van Gogh and by doing this consider themselves a bigger fan of Van Gogh than everyone else out there who cannot afford to buy his work and therefore do not own any of his art.
Ownership connects us with brands.
Web3 creates natively digital property that you can own
Enter Web3!
Bitcoin is the originator for this space and its creation solved a few difficult and interesting problems. Yet probably the most fundamental innovation it created is uniquely scarce digital property.
If I send a WhatsApp image of a Bored Ape to a friend we both own that picture in a way that’s impossible to tell who’s is the original. However, when I send a Bored Ape NFT over to a friend there’s a unique registry on the Ethereum blockchain showing that I no longer own it and now he does, which everyone on the internet can see and validate.
This digital scarcity is hugely significant and the biggest single technical innovation that Brands can capitalise on from Web3.
Going back to the Drake example, up to now other than his music, ie. his main product, he might sell physical merch like t-shirts and hoodies for people to connect with his brand, or have to go into a totally different entertainment vertical by say starring in Films for people to consume and connect with him in new ways.
But with Web3 he can now also sell unique digital goods to his fans and have them connect with him in an entirely new way that was simply never even possible before!
For example, he could run an NFT mint where he sells to his fans unique never before seen Drake related artwork as NFTs. He could then consider all the fans that hold those NFTs to be loyal fans of his and offer the holders discounts to his shows.
Similarly Coca Cola can keep it simple and sell loyalty cards as NFTs that can be used for discounts at shops that accept them. Or they could go all out and allow me to participate in a Santa Claus drawing app where I get to create a digital Santa with Coke bottle and then buy it as an an NFT for me to own in my personal Web3 wallet!
Coca-Cola, give me a Santa Claus NFT!
Brands can also uniquely connect to NFT holders in a way that is simply impossible or impractical in the physical world. For example if I am a painter in the physical world and I want to send some free art as a thank you to all the people who own my art, its incredibly difficult to find all the people that own my paintings and then impractical to mail them all this art as they could be spread all over the world.
But for NFT artists it’s super simple! The blockchain tracks the wallet address of everyone who owns one of their NFTs, and they can simply airdrop a new free piece of art to these fans and strengthen the relationship between their personal brand and their community. NFTs can even act as a way of gating access into dedicated community servers for these artists to interact with their fans!
Web3 creates a whole new avenue for brands, whether big or small, to meaningfully connect with their fans and consumers in ways that remove the limitations of the physical world. It supercharges brands and the communities around them in new ways that we’ve barely scratched the surface on!
We’re building new Web3 solutions every day for brands. If you are interested get in touch.