Introduction
The team behind the ever popular Solana blockchain have launched yet another project to champion mass adoption of blockchain technology. The project is called Bond and it attempts to redefine how brands connects with customers. At the end of the day, Bond will build a direct link between businesses and their loyal admirers, ensuring that they understand them better in order to reward their loyal patronage.
Many businesses have one or more customer loyalty programs to reward users that have built a long-standing business relationship. But a lot of challenges exist which Bond is here to solve. Leveraging blockchain technology, Bond will definitely helps stay in touch with customers and also build a personal connection with each customer no matter whether they are direct or indirect users. Before we go into what Bond is projected to do, here are the current challenges of customer reward programs.
Building personal engagement is challenging
Today, various businesses try to maintain a database and working knowledge of who their customers are. While they might collect personal data such as names, address and phone numbers, these are often not used to build a personal connection with each customer. At the very best, most brands do send out mass marketing information to direct customers through the contacts they collected. Communicating with everyone with the same information is achieved, but building a unique experience with each customer is lost. That is not the only challenge.
Often times, people resell the items they bought from a business, thereby transferring ownership to a new person. How do customers know and connect with the new customer who just joined the userbase indirectly? Most times, these indirect customers do not have any connection to the brand. They often are not known. As a result, there is no personal relationship established with the brand.
It also happens when most companies sell their products through intermediaries. There often exist a B2B connection with their agents or resellers. But then, they do not have any direct connection with the customers that buys the goods from agents and resellers. Hence, it becomes difficult to reward them since they are not tracked in any way by the main suppliers. There is more to this issues.
Businesses often try to have monopoly of customer data. Brands do not want to share any data they collected with another brand unless they are partners. So resellers or other intermediaries might gather data about the customers, but would not be willing to share it with other businesses, even with the main suppliers. As a result, it is difficult for many businesses to connect on personal terms with the customers because they are not selling directly to them.
These and many other issues are what Bond is out to solve.
Bond - linking customers to brands directly
Bond leverages Solana blockchain to create direct user connections with businesses. With Bond, businesses would not just collect and secure user data. But they will be able to create personalized interactions with their customers, understanding their preferences and rewarding them for choosing the brand.
Bond is set out to create an effective platform for brands to build effective personal communication and engagement with their customers. The project has four key deliverables all powered by blockchain technology:
- Leverage Solana's large community: One key deliverable of this project is that each business that joins would have the opportunity to tap into the Solana community - a potential global database of users that run into millions. The Solana community is huge, vibrant and ever expanding. Interestingly, it is a curated community mainly of young people that have taste for technology innovations, data privacy and user-oriented experiences.
Imagine being able to suddenly have millions of brand new customers from across the globe. They have the potential of multiplying any businesses revenue in millions. All Solana users buy from different brands already. Once a brand joins Bond, they have that potential to sell to an entirely new set of users that are willing to spend on stuffs they care about.
- Build product digital authentication: Customers want to be sure they are buying genuine products. With many fake items in the market, Bond will utilize blockchain immutability to help brands build a digital verification protocol. Data stored on the blockchain cannot be altered. Businesses that partner bond will be able to create systems that let customers verify the data about each product on the blockchain, ensuring that they are original.
Bond will also make it possible for brands to track supply chain data about each product. Customers can follow the digital journey of any product from the manufacturer, to the suppliers and down to the end user. Being able to trace who the supplier is will create trust in customers that the product they are about to purchase is genuine.
- Digital collectible of physical products: Each product under the Bond initiative will have a duplicate copy in digital format. They are called NFT's. So customers that pay for a product will also receive a NFT copy of that product. NFTs could be collected and over time resold in NFT markets.
In essence, customers would be able to earn from spending their money. Digital collectibles help to expand the shopping experience for any goods. Users would be able to explore more features of the item in a virtual environment. And when the NFT version is collected, it could provide some form of value in the digital collectibles market.
- Data Privacy: Bond will ensure that user data remains secure and private. With todays frequent cases of hacking, storing user data in centralized servers or in the cloud is dangerous as they might become the target of unauthorize intrusion. Bond will ensure that the privacy of user data is prioritized by using secure blockchain cryptographic features to enhance privacy.
The platform will also allow business-to-business data exchange in a secure an anonymous fashion. As such, businesses would be free to collaborate with other businesses and exchange customer data with endangering the privacy of anyone.
Conclusion
Bond is poised to redefine customer engagements with brands of their choice. Businesses owners might try to leverage this huge opportunity to grow their brands and expand their business with more unique and robust customer rewards protocol from Bond. More details about this project is found in the official handles below:
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