I’ve been mulling over whether as we start to rollout blockchain-based and crypto-economic solutions to the broader market whether the platform itself will matter to the end user.
Whether the language around crypto and blockchain has already entered the mass market vernacular and how this will inform how we position these applications to consumers.
A couple of years ago when early discussions around crypto were more nuanced, less emphatic though equally abstract, there was an early adopter community that believed beyond facts that this was a disruptive change agent for just about everything. And an opposite side that hadn’t really done the work as yet to think critically about the why or why not.
Common ground in these talks was that to the end user in most cases the blockchain was just super smart plumbing and that the ineffable benefits of decentralization would be invisible to the end user couched within an app. And by default, when companies got around to branding products for the marketplace, the platform would simply not be part of the customer connection.
We were just plain wrong.
Not in the power of crypto and the blockchain by any means. But in the accelerated acculturation of these terms into the consumer mindshare. Into mass market awareness if not understanding.
None of us could have foreseen the crazy ride of 2017 where everyone was talking about and trading Bitcoin, Eth and Alt coins. Where your Uber driver, wine shop owner and bar tender, and everyone in between, had heard of the blockchain regardless of the fact that the tiniest minority truly understood it any level.
This is fascinating from a pure social anthropology perspective where in a space of 18 months or so, the world became name-recognition aware of Bitcoin, Eth and blockchain with almost no mass market information leaders. With way more interest that knowledge. And even amongst the developer community itself, widely divergent opinions of what this is all about.
This unique situation where the terms have entered the common language regardless of clarity of definition, is highly informative to how we roll projects out that will touch true end users, not just developers or coin speculators.
How we communicate with customers, how we build perceptions around brands is based on the intersection of who we are and the why of our products with assumptions of what the market believes or is familiar with.
Think for a second about selling some sort of payment app or banking solution to the unbanked of the world, a target for a few of the early projects starting to touch the market.
Will the brands of whichever app the unbanked end up using to move money across country boundaries or store value be simply a bland Venmo type of utility? Or will its source in the crypto world end up being informative to the brand itself and part of the reason in the customers mind why they choose it over another?
Or whether normal folks buying coins on platforms as dramatically distinct as Coinbase and MyEtherWallet understand the different between them (one centralized, one decentralized) and how this impacts the cost, ease of use and security of either one of these solutions?
There is always the marketing argument that end users don’t care about anything but utility.
Invariably this proves untrue, a lazy rush to simplicity and accelerated category commoditization. I believe the very opposite will prove true in this case.
This is a wondrous and unique tangle of broad-based misinformation. Potentially the greatest storytelling and brand communications opportunity of an era.
Invariably building a brand, the core expression of who we are, defines the communications language to what the customer believes they are buying. It bridges that gap between reality and perception, us and them. In tech solutions especially where change and iteration are constant, brand is the instrument (along with community) that engenders empathy and patience with solutions that are invariably not without issues early on.
The marketers reading this will debate the ageless whiteboard conundrum around how laborious it is to educate the world and raise the polemic around whether it is easier to create a new category or clarify or change the existent one.
We simply need to think differently.
This is not the 90s or early 2000s. We can’t simply avoid market awareness or put an E before Commerce, Digital before Communications or Online before whatever.
The power of this revolution is that it captures the imagination and amplifies the awe of what we can accomplish.
You can’t growth hack it into existence. You can’t buy the communities to support you. You can’t fake it.
Welcome to the next era of marketing and communications.
Where communications is the core of marketing and brand an essential element of community building and market success.
Who would have thought that the Satoshi whitepaper would not only change how we think about companies, commerce and communities for social good, but also the language and the dynamics of marketing itself?
If I sound inspired, I most certainly am. As should we all.