Introduction 

Marketing is broken. What was once a multidisciplinary, professional discipline is now a proxy for advertising or a pejorative slur that implies marketing is some kind of trick or con. 

Marketing is especially broken in organisations that are trying to find applications for emerging technology. Often, the marketing strategy is created after a version of the product has been built, without much thinking about the market itself or the customer. 

Change is happening. Disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, quantum computing, 5G, IoT and the way we experience our world via augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will all impact Marketing in a profound way. 

To make things easier, I am going to refer to the collection of technologies above as Web3. 

Web3 is not very well defined. To some it is a movement or an ideology that seeks to overthrow the concentrated power of incumbents like Apple or Google. To others it is the application of technologies like blockchain to reinvent the digital experience as we know it. 

These Web3 technologies will impact the market at a macro level. 

They will change the way consumers behave and browse and discover products and services. 

They will change the value chain and perhaps remove middlemen and aggregators. 

They will impact what a product is, enabling new asset classes and products. 

These technologies will impact the relationships between brands and customers, will change the way identity, personal data and trust work 

They will change the way companies communicate with customers.

… and they may replace the CMO entirely. 

Could an Artificial Intelligence (AI), given all the right market data, and having learned the strengths, weaknesses and strategies of the organisation and its competitors, could it make better decisions than a human marketer? In some ways, they (the AIs) already are. 

The Market of the Future

What is a Market?

Why is marketing called marketing? Let’s start with the market. 

The market, bazaar or souq is as old as buying and selling. For 8,000 years, the market has been the best way humans have found to trade goods and services. From ancient Egypt to Amazon, the market is also one of the best ways we have found to allocate and distribute resources.  

Even the shiny new fields of tokenomics and cryptocurrencies are based on markets and market economics. 

Markets have other properties. Markets establish the prices of goods and services based on supply and demand. This is important to remember later when I discuss the impact of Web3 on pricing and the manipulation of markets through artificial scarcity. 

The availability of an arena has been a feature of markets, (a mall, a high-street, a stock exchange or an online space e.g. Amazon or Roblox. 

Markets also need buyers and sellers. That sounds obvious, but in many cases for emerging technology there seems to be a lot more sellers than buyers.

What is Your Market?

Even though digital technology has made the world smaller and created a global market, you can’t be everything to everyone. There are very few companies who have achieved success by trying to make a product for every kind of customer. So define your market. This will become important later when you develop the value proposition and the customer promise. 

Defining your market also helps you to allocate resources. It means you don’t waste marketing budget on people who will never buy from you. It means you develop products and services that are differentiated based on your understanding of specific needs. 

Every market, from the farmer’s market on a Saturday morning to the secondary market for video game characters to the global market for crude oil has a value chain and characteristics that influence business and marketing strategy. 

Smart investors will often consider these characteristics when evaluating new ideas. 

Disruptive technology can change the status-quo of markets at a macro level by changing the balance of power in different ways. 

Digital technologies have significantly reduced the barriers to entry for many industries. To broadcast video to millions of people you used to have to invest a lot of money in studios, licenses, talent and infrastructure – perhaps even satellites! Now anyone can do it with a free YouTube account. 

An older framework – Porter’s 5 Forces Model is still a useful tool to look at some of the characteristics of  a market. It considers:

• Competition
• Potential of new entrants into the market
• Power of suppliers
• Power of customers
• Threat of substitute products and services 

Competition

Perhaps the biggest complaint with the current ‘Big Tech’ environment is the monopolisation of large parts of the internet by companies like Amazon, Apple and Google. These companies control access to millions of customers through owning the market (e.g. app stores) controlling search results and advertising inventory. They also use large war chests of cash to make it very difficult for smaller companies to grow. 

Competition has an impact on two of the other forces. Low competition can increase the power of suppliers and lower the power of consumers and vice versa. The more choices a customer has, the more power they have. 

Low competition is usually bad for customers. Companies have less incentive to innovate and can charge higher prices. But low competition can also bring efficiencies and network effects. 

High competition within a marketplace can make it more expensive to acquire customers, especially when advertising is being bought in an auction style market.   

How will Web3 technologies impact competition in your market?

• Will the Big-Tech incumbents give up their dominant positions without a fight to new entrants and new technology? Will they fail to see the changes and cling on to the models that currently work for them?
• Are the metaverses going to aggregate into a few walled gardens or will the market move towards interoperability and open source thinking? 
• How many tokens and cryptocurrencies are enough? 
• How do you differentiate yourself in a space with so many projects that seem the same? Are you going for Mass-Market or niche? Do you really understand the competitive environment and what it may look like in 6 months?

Potential of New Entrants Into the Market 

This force is perhaps less relevant today than it used to be. There is more access to capital and lower barriers to entry for many markets. But this force can be affected by regulation which is decoupled from technology. 

Barriers to entry have a significant impact on marketing strategy. Do you go for land-grab market share or focus on building a brand that is known for quality and differentiation? Is your exit strategy to build a long-term sustainable revenue model or be acquired by a larger player? Are you focussing on user growth, rather than profitability? How long do you have before an incumbent decides to offer the same product you are offering?

There are barriers to entry created by new technologies like Artificial Intelligence. The algorithms get better as they grow, as they process more requests and learn from more interactions. An AI that has been learning for 3 years will make better decisions than one that was turned on yesterday. 

For existing businesses looking to pivot to the Web3 space and apply new technologies, your branding is a powerful asset. Many new companies are not yet trusted by customers. Creating a strong brand with loyal customers may dissuade new entrants to come into your space because it will be expensive to make your customers switch. 

On the other hand, If your brand is not trusted, if you have bad reviews or offer a poor experience, then new players will see this as an opportunity. 

A good example of this is Neo-Banks. Banking is a highly regulated market which makes it very difficult to launch a new bank. Consumer deposits had to be protected and compliance requirements add additional overhead. However, banking is a very old industry and has moved slowly. As mentioned in the competition section, low competition leads to a lack of innovation and complacency. There is no incentive for a bank to create a better customer experience because customers have few options. 

If however, the regulations change based on new technology, like they did in the UK with Open Banking, new entrants can move more quickly and offer differentiation.

Many of these Neo-Banks have used Customer Experience (CX) as their differentiator. They can on-board a new customer with a selfie and a photo of a form of ID in minutes where traditional banks require interviews, paperwork and days of checks before they open an account.     

Power of Suppliers

Who are your suppliers? How much competition is there among them? 

A handful of companies currently have control over distribution (e.g. the App Store), and advertising inventory (Google & Facebook). Amazon controls the ‘buy button’ and social media platforms have the power to remove content or accounts. 

We have seen shortages in semiconductors ie. microchips and global supply chains have been disrupted by the COVID pandemic. Companies that relied on China for their inputs suffered while others, like Tesla, who make many of their components in-house fared much better. 

The power of suppliers is a big potential threat for marketers. Many brands rely on platforms like Instagram to acquire customers and communicate through influencers. However history shows us that these platforms usually have a limited lifespan. The audience grows up, gets bored, moves on and one day your market has disappeared. 

There has been a big impact on Ecommerce businesses as a result of Apple changing the way Facebook data is shared with iPhone users. Apple may not have been seen as a ‘supplier’ in this case, but their power is significant. 

In the Web3 world there are new suppliers. Blockchains that use ‘proof of work’ have ‘miners’ who influence the transaction costs on the blockchain. Those miners are in-turn affected by the suppliers of electricity and GPU chips. Blockchains that use ‘Proof of Stake’ require liquidity. Large investors, often called whales, have power and influence in the market which is unpredictable. 

There is another supplier to think about. The people in your team. Coders who are good at programming languages like Solidity and Rust are in high demand and have a lot of market power as do good data scientists. Your ability to compete in the market depends on your ability to attract and keep talent.  

Power of Customers

Digital technology has empowered customers in many markets. Customers can compare prices globally, they can read reviews and use social media to talk about bad experiences. In markets where there is high competition, customers have more power because they can switch more easily. Porting your data from your Samsung to your Huawei is a tap on a screen. 

Digital technology has also made customers weaker than ever. Brands have accepted a certain amount of ‘churn’ and as an individual, your complaint may not mean much, especially in markets where there is little competition and high switching costs.   

In some business to business (B2B) markets, there may only be a handful of customers. If you don’t have them as a customer, you don’t have a business. Despite regulations, these customers may also operate like a cartel, agreeing prices and operating as a group. 

As a marketer, you need to understand which of your customers has power. If 90% of your revenue comes from one customer, then you need a strategy to diversify your customer base. You also need to keep an eye on your churn and the sentiment of the feedback you are getting from customers. 

Some Web3 companies are exploring new models. The Distributed Autonomous Organisation (DAO) blurs the lines between customer, investor and stakeholder. By requiring market participants to take a financial stake in the ecosystem the actors are, in theory, less likely to engage in behaviour that would risk or damage the market. In other words, if you are both the customer and the owner, your behavior will be altered. It’s too early to tell if the theory will be proven. 

Technologies such as smart contacts can go both ways for customers. A travel insurance company could pay compensation for a cancelled flight without a claim needing to be filed if all the conditions are met. The opposite is the classic ‘computer says no’ situation where there is no nuance or empathy and complaints are dealt with by AIs and decision trees. 

Threat of Substitute Products & Services

Marketers have a blindspot for this one, especially in an age where people’s time is scarce. 

I have a choice with what to do with my leisure time on a Sunday afternoon. I can play a video game, or watch Formula 1 on TV or I can play a round of golf. Web3 technologies will create new products and experiences which will compete with traditional offers. On the other hand, virtual or digital assets need to establish value. E.g should I buy a plot of land in my home-town or a metaverse?  

There are many case studies of companies that have disappeared because they ignored the threat of substitute products and services. Kodak never thought that the digital camera would ever rival film. Magazines never thought that their advertisers would move their budgets to online advertising. Banks never thought people would trust brands like Revolut or Paypal. Myspace came and went, Facebook is on the decline and Tik-Tok is rising. 

So how does your marketing strategy account for the threat of new products or services? 

• Understand what it is that you do : Do you sell drill-bits or do you make holes? Do you sell film, or help people share memories? Do you sell seats on a plane or enable great journeys?

• Differentiate your offer : As a strategy you can choose to be cheaper, though competing on price is never a great long term business decision. You can be high quality – a smaller market, but more profit. You can offer a great service, something that helped Amazon win. 

• Build a Brand : Brands can be a way for people to engage in virtue signaling or to display a part of their personality or identity. Are you a Coke or Pepsi person? What does it say about you that you own an iPhone versus an Xaomi? Are your jeans Levis or GAP? Do you wear a Rolex or a Swatch? People who buy into brands are a lot harder to convert to a substitute product. 

• Monitor Trends : Kodak could have seen digital film coming. Just like banks know that cryptocurrency and decentralised finance (DeFi) has the potential to change their market significantly. What markets do autonomous vehicles impact? No parking garages required. No taxi drivers required. What does text to art AI mean for designers? What does working from home mean for commercial real estate? What does 5G mean for augmented reality and the future of travel guides? Consider the future using tools like Scenario Planning. 

• Increase switching costs : Not a very Web3 concept, but has been used by many companies to protect their business. Like mobile phone networks making it hard to port your number or making calls to other people on the same network cheaper. Having a loyalty scheme may stop people from trying a substitute because they have spent time building up their points. Making your music library be in a certain kind of filetype that can’t be played on different devices.   

Your Market

You can’t start building products or working out pricing or building a marketing strategy until you understand what market you are in and what that market looks like. 

There is little benefit in taking a massive macro-number and using it to justify entry into the space. McKinsey Consulting have published a report that has been widely quoted. It estimates the ‘Metaverse’ economy at USD 5 Trillion in 2030. This sounds like a big number, almost too big. The global mobile phone market in 2021 was ‘only’ USD 457.18 billion. Global retail ecommerce was around 5 Trillion. 

Saying you are in the Web3 market or the Metaverse market is like saying you are in mobile or ‘the internet’. It doesn’t help you create a strategy based on the market forces. Even if you say you are in the gaming market, there are segments.

Many Web3 projects are focussed on GenZ, but the people funding those projects are GenX. The people who created the Metaverse blueprint – from Snow Crash to Ready Player One to Free Guy use GenX cultural references.   

Use the frameworks discussed in this section to understand the forces that shape the market today and what might happen in the future. 

The Future of Marketing

Marketing is more than just managing a Discord server or making Tik-Tok videos. At a CMO level, there is a lot more going on. Just defining and understanding the market can be a full time role for a team of people. 

Web3 thinking and technology will impact all of the elements of a marketing leader’s role. Another older framework is very useful to understand all of the levers of the marketing engine. Since the 1960s, ‘The 4 Ps of Marketing have been used to focus on Marketing with a capital M. The marketing mix as it was called includes:

• Products & Services
• Place, physical distribution or channels 
• Price & profitability, or business model e.g freemium, or ad-funded. 
• Promotion, The bit that most people think is marketing. 

Various other Ps have been added to the marketing mix over time including People and process. Process could be internal (systems) or external (the Customer experience CX). Personally, I argue there could be some others like Proposition and Promise. 

Proposition and Promise

One of the best ways to protect your business from the threat of substitutes and guide your marketing plan is to have a deep understanding of what it is you are offering to your customers. 

What problems are you solving? What needs are you satisfying? What is the utility or the benefit of your product or service? 

Remember the Kodak example. They thought they were making film. They were – but why? What is film for? Film helped people to capture moments in photographs. Film enabled people to tell stories, to relive past memories – good and bad. Film helped create a record of history. 

Digital cameras had no film. But what did they do? They helped people to capture moments, to tell stories, to relive past memories and to create a record of history. 

Another example. A drill company in Texas made drills and drill bits. For wood, for metai, for building, for manufacturing. But what is the benefit of a drill? What does it help the customer to achieve? It makes a hole. Once the company got out of the mindset of making drills and into the mindset of making holes, they were able to create new products – lasers, saws and other tools and protect their business from new technology that was designed to make holes. 

Understand Utility

Marketing leaders should have an understanding of microeconomic and market theory. Many of the concepts have real application to marketing strategy and decision making. 

Utility refers to the total satisfaction or benefit from consuming a good or service. Utility can be subjective and relative. Not everyone gets the same satisfaction from eating a chocolate bar. The utility of a sports car is not defined by its top speed when driven through a village with a speed limit. 

The benefit or utility of Google to a user is convenience. I can find what I am searching for in an instant. I don’t have to open up a phone book with 1000 pages or trawl through a library or scan a series of maps. For business, the utility is the ability to be found, either through organic links or paid advertising. 

The benefit to me of Facebook is that I can stay in touch with friends, even if they are on the other side of the world. The benefit to a politician is they can target and influence certain voters based on their declared interests. 

Utility is affected by all aspects of the marketing mix. Behavioural economists have identified different types of utility including: 

• form – the product and it’s features and benefits, but also the end-to-end customer experience. 
• time – where convenience comes into play. Why a pharmacy that is open 24/7 might provide more utility than one that is open 5 days a week during office hours.  
• place – a litre of water in the middle of the desert in summer provides more utility than an ice-cream in Antarctica
• possession – seems to be the one driving products like NFTs at the moment. The utility is in owning the asset rather than consuming it.    

The other concept of utility that is important to keep in the back of your mind as a marketer is marginal utility. Marginal utility is the utility gained by consuming an additional unit of a service or good. As a friend of mine used to say – you can only drive one sports car at a time. 

The chocolate bar example is probably better. Eat one bar and you get some enjoyment, some nourishment, some energy. Eat another and you probably don’t get the same utility as the first. Eat another and the utility you get might be negative, you might start to feel sick. 

Many Web3 projects fail to adequately define exactly what utility they are providing to customers. Even if it is just an existing product or service but delivered on the blockchain, the inherent properties of the blockchain must offer additional utility – like transparency or privacy or security.

Proposition Exercise

Take a look at your current website homepage, or if you don’t have one, take a look at your Facebook page or Instagram feed or your ‘White Paper’. 

Is your Value Proposition clear? Does it pass the ‘blink’ test – could a customer understand your Value proposition in less than 3 seconds?

Distil your customer promise down to a single phrase or series of short phrases. Remember the  emotional benefits you provide and the utility your customer values 

“We use sustainably sourced materials to create unique pieces of furniture that your guests will notice and admire.”

“Our travel bags are designed for the most hostile conditions. We back our products with a lifetime guarantee. This is the only bag you will ever need.”  

Utility also informs a customer’s sense of value. Some customers value convenience, some customers value service, some value quality. 

So you need to know your customers. 

Buyer & Customer Personas 

You may not have one proposition, you may have many depending on who your customers are. But Web3 might break the concept of buyer personas in a couple of ways:

• Personal data may not be as freely available to enable understanding and targeting. Companies that have invested in First and Zero party data will be better placed. 
• The concept of identity may change. Customers may ‘roleplay’ multiple identities that don’t conform to traditional ‘human’ demographics – especially in the metaverse. 

Web3 may be a step backwards for marketing people who use data to personalise messaging and create relevant communication targeted to specific customers or segments. 

Nevertheless, the buyer persona exercise can be useful to hone the proposition and more efficiently allocate resources in the product roadmap, choosing which channels to be present in, determining a price point and how to build effective advertising campaigns. 

It may be useful to consider how the answers to these questions affect how a customer values the utility of the product or service that you offer. 

• How old are they, what gender are they (does it matter)? 
• Do they like playing football or doing Sudoku? 
• Do they like to travel? 
• Are they educated, tech-savvy, cost conscious, risk-averse?
• What are some of the adjectives that describe them? Strong. Passionate. Reserved. Understated. Arrogant. 

Note: The use of data and algorithms and recommendation engines may make traditional buyer personas redundant. Behaviour may be a better predictor of future actions than more traditional demographic and psychographic profiling. Take Netflix as an example: does age, location and gender dictate what TV and films people watch? The answer according to Netflix is: no. 

However, to utlise the benefits that Netflix enjoys, you need a lot of data. 

Are Buyer Personas Important for Web3 Marketing?

Go back to the work you did on your Value Proposition. What promises are you making to your customers? Which customers did you have in mind when you did that exercise?

As you work through each part of the marketing mix, you need to have your buyer personas in mind. As you are designing products, as you are choosing channels, as you are determining pricing, as you are creating content and campaigns. 

Every time you make a marketing decision you should be looking at a picture of your buyer persona. Find an image online and stick it on the wall in front of you to remind yourself who you are doing this for. 

Are Community and Customers the Same Thing?

Don’t Forget your Anoraks

Anorak (slang) … “Anorak” /ˈænəræk/ is British slang which refers to a person who has a very strong interest, perhaps obsessive, in niche subjects. This interest may be unacknowledged or not understood by the general public. As an aside, the derivation probably has something to do with these people standing in the rain trainspotting or plane-spotting.

Every business has anoraks, geeks or pro-sumers, but even more so in Web3. The early-adopter community is important, but you should think hard about making all your marketing decisions to please them. 

Web3, using Discord and concepts like Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAO) are more open to engaging with anoraks and early adopters when making decisions. 

The Pros:

• They are the kind of people who love being consulted for their expertise and will give their ideas, often without any compensation.
• Anoraks in Web3 are advocates and fans. If you can build a relationship with these customers then they are more likely to be loyal, repeat buyers, but you also have to work hard to keep them happy. You need to care about the product as much as they do. 
• It can be a good reality check. It is quite common for a marketing department or brand team to assume they know their customers or imagine their customers in a certain way that is different from reality. It happens all the time. For example, the brand manager who sells $3 supermarket shampoo who spends $400 on a haircut and only uses salon products. Or the sports marketing person who thinks their fans drink wine and eat cheese, when in fact they prefer burgers and beer. 

The Cons:

• Remember that what your anorak customers say and do might be different, so look at the data. Just because someone is an McLaren F1 fan doesn’t mean they can afford a 765LT
• Be careful about letting your customers run your strategy completely. Everyone is a back seat driver or a couch football manager. Passion does not always equal experience and is not a substitute for data. 
• Pay attention to the diversity of the community. Does the makeup of the community reflect your target customer? Are there different points of view, from different lenses – whether they be gender, generational, ethnic or dissenters? Groupthink can be a threat to any project. 

Buyer Persona Exercises

Competitor Analysis 

Have a look at your competitors’ social media feeds, advertising campaigns or website. 

Can you work out who their intended buyer personas are? Is there more than one persona? Is the communication, e.g. copy, imagery, tone of voice targeted at a specific persona? Are you going to be targeting the same personas?

Now do the same exercise for your own website or social media. Are you already thinking about your customer types?

Buyer Persona Gallery

Search for a photo online for each of your buyer personas, or – for a bit of fun, ask an AI like Midjourney to draw your buyer persona. Give them a name. Print them out and stick them to the wall so you can look up at them when you are making decisions.

Next time you think about a new product, look up at the gallery of faces and ask yourself – which one of them is this product for? 

Next time you create a product description or Instagram story, look up at the gallery and ask – which one of these types am I doing this for? Will my behaviour resonate with them? Am I using the right imagery or tone of voice?

Your Brand is Your Customer Promise

The concept of branding seems to be missing from the original 4P model of marketing, and it’s often not considered by start-ups who are too busy doing. Many Web3 companies hire a Marketing Director or a CMO well into the process, often after a product has been built and brought to market. 

Brand marketing people who have worked for well established brands at companies like Unilever or Diageo have been able to distil all that a brand stands for into a phrase or a set of words that everything else builds from. This is sometimes called the brand core or essence.

This is not a strap-line or vision statement. Slogans come and go, derived from the brand-core. Sometimes, the brand core concepts are unknown to consumers and in some cases, almost unable to be guessed.

Guinness – A Case Study

Once upon a time, a marketing person who was responsible for Guinness, the dark coloured Irish stout, told me that there were three words at the core of the brand. I could give you 100 guesses and you might get 1 out of the 3. But once you know them, they make a lot of sense. They are….

Goodness | Power | Communion

• Goodness. Not a word you would typically associate with a beer. But a word that has appeared in Guinness advertisements for decades. In 1929, the brand used a campaign – ‘Guinness is Good for You‘ – and there are some arguments to justify this claim.
• Power. In the 1930s, Guiness ran ads with the slogan – ‘Guinness for Strength’, which they might not get away with today, however the more modern ads still have this word at the core. Take a look at ‘The Surfer‘, a black and white TV commercial from 1998 which features horses in pounding waves. Why was the ad in black and white? Look at a glass of Guinness. The power theme also comes through in some of the sports that the brand supports – like rugby.

• Communion. A secular definition of this word is ‘an act or instance of sharing.’ This in and of itself makes a lot of sense for a beer brand. Many campaigns feature friends together, sharing a drink and a moment. Once again, Rugby is a team sport with a close camaraderie . However, that is not the whole story. Guinness is an Irish brand – in fact it’s hard to think of an Irish brand recognised more globally. Communion has a very different definition for the predominantly Catholic Irish population. Having this word at the core of the brand gives everything that Guinness does a deeper meaning.

Your Brand is a Form of Market Manipulation

When you undertook your analysis of your market and your competition and the forces at work in that market, you considered the concepts of substitutes and switching costs and elasticity.  I will talk more about price elasticity in the Pricing chapter.

Elasticity describes the degree to which a change in price affects demand. 

Branding can be a determining factor for elasticity. If done right, a brand makes a product or service unique and therefore it is harder for customers to find substitutes. Small increases in price will not result in large changes in demand. In fact, consumers may give up other purchases in order to pay more for your branded product. 

Consumers are changing. Price may be less important to some customers than experience. Experience elasticity could also be affected by your brand. Customers may put up with more friction during their customer journey if they are invested in your brand. The strength of your brand, and the degree to which customers will put up with a ‘bad’ experience will determine the elasticity.

Coffee is a good example. Coffee is a commodity. Beans. Hot water. Perhaps milk and sugar. Coffee without a brand is just another beverage with a kick. But coffee is also an experience – it has a taste, a temperature, perhaps a routine. So it is not enough to just brand the ingredients, the customer experience (CX) needs to be branded too.

Think of a coffee brand… your coffee brand of choice (if you have one). What are the promises it makes to you? Perhaps drinking a certain kind of coffee makes a statement and making that statement is more important than the brown liquid inside the cup.

Elasticity is also affected by switching costs. If your brand creates uniqueness, then switching becomes harder. Even if Coke was exactly the same as Pepsi, you couldn’t switch between them because brand Coke is not the same as brand Pepsi.

Switching costs can also be engineered into the customer experience. Nespresso is probably the best example of this. You need a specific machine and specially designed capsules to experience Nespresso. Once you have invested in a machine that can only make coffee using the capsules, the switching costs are higher.

Customers may be willing to accept that there are limited Nespresso stores and that capsules are hard to get. They may put up with a website that has a sub-optimal user experience (UX) because they are locked into buying coffee in a certain way. You need a very strong brand to be able to pull this off – and after losing a court case to stop other coffee makers using the capsule design for use in Nespresso machines – the brand may need to reassess what the real value promise is.

If the value is in the machines, and not the coffee, could you cross-pollinate two seemingly competing brands? Yes. We have reached peak coffee branding. Starbucks by Nespresso! shows that brands with different promises and experiences can be combined to leverage overlapping markets, and perhaps, take advantage of customers’ tendency to switch.

This kind of marketing requires that brand managers and owners leave their egos at the door and think about the bigger picture. Why would Netflix build a player for Sony Playstation? Because there are over 100 million PS4 consoles connected to the internet and TVs around the world.

And maybe these two brands understand their buyer personas and value proposition in relation to the market. Perhaps they understand that some purists argue that neither Starbucks or Nespresso is very ‘good’ coffee. Which is why, at launch, there is a Blonde Espresso Roast product in the offer.

Remember your Brand DNA. What are you being truthful to? Get it right and your brand can provide you some insulation from trust issues in an unregulated space or accusations of ponzi schemes. 

Branding for Startups and Web3 Startups 

Why should you think about having a brand from the start? 

A brand enables you to charge higher prices. Why does a Ferrari cost more than a Toyota? Why does a Rolex cost more than a Swatch? Why does an iPhone cost more than a Xiaomi? 

A brand helps you spread your message more efficiently by creating a collective memory. What do you think about when I say ‘Swoosh’?  What is the verb for searching for something on the internet? Name a company that makes cola. If you are in a foreign country and you are looking for a burger, something familiar that will be just like you get back home will you choose the ‘Golden Arches’?

A brand is also an intangible asset – the difference on the balance sheet between turnover market capitalisation. If you are doing it right. Brands work both ways and can become symbols that customers avoid.  

Your brand has a persona too. While it might seem like marketing waffle, the brands that are successful are consistent and true to their core. Even if customers don’t know the real core or the origin story. 

For many, Nike is a swoosh. But why would a company that makes athletic equipment be called Nike? In Greek mythology, Nike was the winged goddess of victory. Athletes who wanted to win worshipped her. Sounds like a good match. 

Customers don’t need to know that Apple is inspired by the story of Isaac Newton or that Starbucks is a character in Moby Dick because the brands are now the net reputation of the company.

A brand core can help you deliver a more consistent experience, from the product to the advertising.In sports like sailing or motorsport they call it a box rule – a set of guidelines that keep you focussed but allow you to innovate. 

There are new tools that might help to develop your brand too. If you spend the time distilling your brand-core down to a few words, try typing those words into a text to image AI like Midjourney. The results can be informative and inspiring.  

It may be too early to know which of the Web3 brands will age well, and that’s if the start-ups have thought about branding at all. It seems like the ability to secure a domain name is the primary consideration, rather than any long term thinking. 

The Impact of Web3 on Established Brands

Companies that have spent time building brands in the pre-Web3 world have advantages over new entrants, but there are also threats to established brands in an unregulated space. History seems to be repeating itself in many ways, with CMOs having to make decisions about which virtual world to enter and when. 

As mentioned, customer personas may change. What does a purple giraffe carrying your high-end designer handbag do for your brand? Does your product or service have relevance at all in a virtual world? Banks are a terrible customer experience in the real world, let alone the metaverse. 

But what if your brand could be a virtual being? What if Ronald Macdonald or the Michelin man could come to life and be brand representative and interact and influence 24/7? 

Branding will appear in all of the following sections. There is an impact on the product mix, pricing, placement and of course promotion.

Foundations and Fundamentals

Whether you are a new Web3 native company or a 200 year old brand that needs to stay relevant, revisiting your value proposition, your customers and your promise as communicated through your brand is fundamental to your marketing strategy. 

The utility that you offer is baked into your product design, and new products may be able to be created if you understand the benefits you are providing and the needs you are satisfying rather than the form that product takes. 

Your customers may be changing. Are you thinking about who you want your customer to be rather than the ones you have now? Can you involve your customers using community tools or even a DAO? 

How does your brand translate into a Web3 space? Can you leverage the trust and consistency you have created in the current market into a new one?