About Modern Marketing
A very popular concept in modern marketing is to make your customers feel like they belong to something bigger, that they are part of the company. I am going to paraphrase from my own knowledge - I don't like to research while writing, I usually just freewrite based on my previous knowledge and roll with it.
Look at Starbucks, they came up with the whole concept of asking for your name, and then call you up when your beverage is ready. This small addition to the customer experience, along with some others, took them to the moon in terms of users and retention (revisits from the same user).
They found a way to make the experience more personalized just by asking for the customer's name, and increased the sense of ownership by writing their name in the cup, turning a simple plastic cup into your very own cup feeling.
Everyone emulated the strategy. Nowadays, even in third worlder Mexico, even the quesadillas lady from the corner does it, and it still works. It doesn't have the same impact as it did 15 years ago, but it still serves as a little differentiator among same-niche businesses.
Sense of belonging in crypto
Forget about Bitcoin for a second. Bitcoin is for the OGs and it made its own name without marketing or strategies, and the adoption was mainly driven by ideology more than anything else. Bitcoin was the epitome and embodiment of build it and they'll come and the code speaks for itself, it will get adopted, so let's focus on modern altcoins.
Today, there are thousands of crypto projects around and hundreds of thousands of shitcoins. Any kind of blockchain-based company or project, competes with hundreds of ideas that revolve around the very same concepts, have the same foundations, leverage the same value and target the same audience.
There has to be a value proposition, there has to be a differentiator.
But it is definitely easier said than done. Look at Hive, we have one of the strongest and more loyal communities in the cryptospace and yet, we fail to attract new users, even though we have a robust and solid value proposition backed by stupidly good foundations.
I keep going back every now and then to the whole meme culture, and how corpo companies keep trying to leverage memes to connect with their target userbase, and how they constantly fail at this. Wendy's is one of the few examples that actually succeeded at this, and this was only by mere luck because they happened to give the Community manager position to a professional 4chan shitposter in their spare time.
Memes won an election in the US, at least to a degree. Memes are extremely powerful. They allow anyone to connect with other people who feel or think the same way in an ironic, jokingly fashion that turns unironic once that first sign of trust appears.
People might jokingly say they hate their life, but if the person listening says OMG me too, wen suicide? then the first person assumes full ownership of the first comment and a connection to a deeper level happens. Granted, a shitty connection, but it is how modern connections and bonding happens, especially in a day and age where we no longer see people face to face and we rather text them, engage over a comment section, or watch the updates they want us to see in social media.
It's all about that bonding process
Let's go back to memes.
Pepe the token is only popular and went to the actual fucking moon because there is a whole crypto degen culture behind it. You heard about the launch of $PEPE and their path to success through degen pumps, but in reality, there were around 4 years of rare pepe subculture shares happening in random text forums where you could either find a picture of a dog or a video of a cat getting mauled by a pack of coyotes.
Those places where memes are born, and where true crypto degens roam, the same places where I've found 4 shitcoins that gave me a 50x before anyone on X, formerly Twitter, even heard of its existence.
There are two things that makes these retards feel like they belong there, with their own subculture: memes and anonymity.
It's no wonder why a ton of early crypto adopters are basement dwellers, 4chan navigators, and chicken tender eaters, all at the same time.
Translating this into Hive and Leo
Bitcoin maximalism is bad according to most altcoin evangelists. Hive maximalism is bad according to some L2 evangelists. Leo maximalism is bad according to a few Hive OGs.
But in the end, Bitcoin, Hive, and Leo managed to nurture this layer of maxis. This maximalism is based in different reasons and I'm not going to discuss them here. What I want to attack is how Hive managed to make their users feel like they belong, and how Leo, in my honest opinion, is excelling at this as well.
Once a Hive user gets past the initial rewards, the excitement from that first payout, the stress from those first transactions, the cold bucket that downvotes bring, and all of the newbie learning process... once the rewards start to plateau in a sense that they are no longer getting rewarded because we want them to fully experience the perks the social side of Hive offers, and that they are getting rewarded according to how they roll in the community, users have two choices: To stay and make a Hive career and build their brand or to simply move on to other pastures, no matter if they are greener or not.
Those who stay, are probably here forever, there's no escape. This retention rate depends a lot on the rewards the users get, which also depends on where they live and how they see their rewards: a main income, a side hustle, or an investment for the future. Either way, and I think we are past this culture, the fact that some people come for the rewards is the main reason they end up leaving.
But then again, why do people go to Instagram and stay, even without rewards on the table? And why is the IG retention rate so different than Hive's?
Is it the user experience Instagram provides? Is it the toxic reward culture Hive has? Is it the problematic sign up process Hive has?
I have a follow up post to this one, but I would like to listen to other Hivers and Lions' opinions before I write that one down, so please leave some feedback in the comment section!
Just some concept I though of for an AI generated image, because what bigger sense of belonging than being invited to someone's birthday, or having a bunch of people you love attending your celebration? Also Lions because some people think I'm a Leo maxi - when irl I'm just a Hive maxi who also maxies on Leo, lol.