In recent years, blockchain technology has been making waves in various industries, offering innovative solutions that can give companies a competitive edge. One area where blockchain is making a significant impact is in the world of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). NFTs are digital assets that are unique, non-interchangeable, and cannot be replicated. They have several properties that can change traditional marketing practices. In this blog post, we’ll explore how NFTs can potentially revolutionize branding, channels, pricing, and promotions in the marketing world.
NFTs Revolutionizing Marketing Mix
First and foremost, NFTs’ digital nature allows for a new level of flexibility and versatility in branding. Companies can now create unique digital identities for their products and services that can’t be replicated or counterfeited. These digital identities can then be used to create unique and compelling stories that can engage customers and build brand loyalty. Additionally, NFTs can be used to develop limited-edition digital items, adding a level of exclusivity and rarity that can drive demand and increase perceived value.
NFTs also open up new channels for marketing, such as online marketplaces and social media platforms. These new channels can provide transparency and trustworthiness that traditional marketing channels can’t match. NFTs can also be used to create new and innovative pricing models, such as dynamic pricing, where the price of an NFT is determined by market demand.
NFTs can also revolutionize promotions. Companies can now create special promotions, such as limited-time offers or exclusive deals, that can only be accessed by owning a specific NFT. This creates a new level of engagement and loyalty among customers, who are now incentivized to hold and collect specific NFTs to take advantage of these promotions.
However, it’s important to note that several short- and long-term issues will significantly impact the usefulness and attractiveness of NFTs in marketing and the broader world. For example, competitive dynamics, the need for experimentation and ease of use, creator royalties, and the risk of bad actors will all need to be addressed as NFTs become more mainstream.
Unlocking the Potential of NFTs with Escalate Group
In conclusion, NFTs have the potential to change traditional marketing practices in several ways. However, it will take time and experimentation to fully realize the potential of NFTs.
Our company, Escalate Group, has a Web3 innovation studio that can assist businesses in identifying Blockchain web3 business opportunities, gaining a competitive advantage, and producing exceptional results. As NFTs continue to evolve and gain mainstream acceptance, they will become an essential part of a brand’s overall digital experience and drive new marketing practices. So, keep an eye on this technology, as it will be a disruptor in the future!
*I used OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Grammarly tools to generate some of the content for this post.
The internet is changing, and it’s creating new opportunities for businesses. Five significant forces are shaping the next decade: Total enterprise reinvention, talent, sustainability, Metaverse, and ongoing technology revolution. The Metaverse is going to change how businesses operate and how they connect with customers and employees. It will affect everything from customer experience to how products are made and managed.
It’s essential to have a responsible Metaverse with two key dimensions: trust and humanity. Trust is about security, privacy, resilience, and IP protection. Humanity is about safety, sustainability, well-being, inclusion, equity, and accessibility.
The potential of the Web3 economy for brands is enormous
Not only can it create incremental value for market-focused players, but it has the potential to become a new revenue stream if players focus on providing customers with a new, better, and different way of doing things. This is where customer-led innovation comes in – by providing transformative value and disrupting the value chain in existing industries, new value can be created that didn’t exist before.
But it’s important to remember that we’re still in the early days of Web3 and the Metaverse. There’s still a lot we don’t know, so a humble approach is important. Experimenting with Web3 will be critical to improving and transforming our businesses. We must also be worthy of these powerful technologies and include ethical and moral considerations.
Define your company’s position now
This is where our company, Escalate Group, comes in. We can help you explore the business relevance of the Metaverse, crypto economies, and blockchain. Our Web3 innovation studio will work with you to integrate these emerging technologies into your broader transformation initiatives. From assessing current programs to developing pilot programs to governing your ecosystem, we know how to derive business value from Web3.
Our web3 advisory mini sprints are designed to help you envision and plan for business opportunities related to digital collectibles, token communities, and crypto economies. We’ll guide you through the process of reimagining your business, leveraging in-depth research from our team and extended community to examine next-generation strategies, tools, and technologies. This will enable you to connect physical and virtual worlds for employees, customers, clients, and communities.
The potential is limitless. Charting new revenue paths and seizing new opportunities has never been more urgent. Web3 and the Metaverse will unlock new possibilities. Web3 is an ecosystem play. Pioneering ideas today will create the leaders of tomorrow. Whether you want to defend your market or be a disrupter, defining a strategy cannot be done in isolation without knowing the marketplace of established and new native players and platforms. So, we’ve got you covered whether you need to find the right implementation partners, conduct a strategic re-design of your target operating model, or define a metaverse sourcing strategy.
*I used OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Grammarly tools to generate some of the content for this post.
During the fall of 2014, attending the executive program of Singularity University at the heart of the Silicon Valley, the idea that Blockchain would be as significant to the growth of the internet in the next fifteen years as the internet has been in the previous 25 years started to grow in my mind.
Two market cycles after, I have seen many of the world’s best minds and billions of dollars in investment pouring into the space to figure out how to use the technology to make a fully digital society a reality. The adoption of Bitcoin has increased its positioning as a store of value; smart contracts have enabled crowdfunding, stablecoins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and Decentralized finance (DeFi).
Companies in various industries use blockchain to streamline processes and foster greater transparency and trust. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global blockchain market is projected to grow from $7.18 billion in 2022 to $163.83 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 56.3% in the forecast period.
Blockchain is more than Bitcoin, Stable Coins, NFTs, DeFi, and Crypto.
Considering the pandemic, we have seen that the two main factors driving the expansion of the blockchain market are the financial services sector’s competitiveness and the health sector’s digitalization. Also, growth is fueled by the increased demand for data security, and there is already noticeable progress in the supply chain, gaming, music, and the arts.
Our Web3 innovation practice has been helping firms in the fintech, financial services, energy, healthcare, entertainment, manufacturing, and telecommunications sectors to assess the impact of blockchain and other exponential technology and trends on their business, develop integrated programs to enhance their current business models, create new ones, and gain and track their competitive advantages.
We know from experience that blockchain is still in its infancy and that it has yet to demonstrate its potential to transform the current internet into the internet of the future. But every business needs to dip a toe into the web3 wave. While in most businesses, it might still be early to commit entirely, there are certain areas where the race has already started.
Why Blockchain?
We are moving from the sharing economy into the ownership economy with new ways people organize around a project; communities and decentralized organizations will play a critical role. Blockchain technology becomes essential for business and society if you believe that material contributions should have clear ownership and provenance.
Blockchain is a platform for disintermediation; it is about trust, decentralization, and ownership. Consumers can own their data, and the technology enables tools to reward contributors and user behavior, boosting creativity, collaboration, and digital communities.
Communities are starting to engage their members, simplifying the technology and the user experience, and from there, they are beginning to explore opportunities. Therefore, adoption driven by digital communities will be critical and effective.
When technology is simple to use and solves a real problem, it is quickly embraced by the public. As it is, blockchain will not be an exception. Businesses must explore, build, measure, learn, and repeat to develop the skills required to flourish in the web3.
How to gain web3 competitive edge?
Below are the components of a disruptive innovation system to help organizations embrace blockchain disruption, gain competitive advantages, and make web3 happen.
Begin with a Massive Transformative Purpose that can be taken by your organization and your community or one that can draw a new community.
Proactively and pragmatically assess market trends impacting your business to identify opportunities where trust, ownership, and disintermediation have the potential to change the future of your industry.
Leverage your Purpose, develop relationships, and nurture community; this way, the right people will find you.
Engage your community, and educate yourself on web3 to better identify the problems your organization can solve and the jobs to be done with the customer at the core.
Set aggressive objectives and 3-5 measurable key results (OKRs), run experiments, fall fast, and learn quickly.
Establish and maintain a business rhythm and help your team to identify what they need to create new business models and monetization mechanisms.
Use data, dashboards, and real-time information to make informed decisions about where and how to invest across the web3 innovation portfolio.
Understand and measure your key success factors (KSFs), and hold yourself and your team accountable. Identify the #1 most prominent specific and measurement activity to success.
Wash, rinse, and repeat; and make sure you extend your web3 disruption innovation culture.
Those who don’t start climbing the web3 learning curve may miss the most significant value-creation opportunity of our lifetimes, just as many people did during the transition to the world wide web in the 90s and the second wave during the 00s, where the user-generated content business models emerged.
If you have any comments or suggestions or would like to continue the conversation, do get in touch with us.
In today’s digital age, small to mid-size organizations must remain competitive by innovating and adapting quickly. They need to leverage their strengths, address their shortcomings, and determine their key differentiators to maintain a strong position in the market. Staying ahead of emerging market trends and adjusting their strategy to ensure exponential growth is critical.
Imagine a small IT offshore services company, ValTech, that specializes in providing customized and reliable IT service management solutions to mid-size businesses in various industries. To stay competitive, the organization must leverage its strengths, such as its expertise in customizing IT solutions based on client needs, its reliable and fast turnaround time, and its excellent customer service.
In the next three years, ValTech envisions becoming a trusted and go-to IT partner for its clients, expanding its service offerings to include emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, and building a solid and loyal customer base that refers new clients to the company. Setting a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound vision for success is important; making sure your organization stays true to a purpose that inspires you and your team to work towards achieving it will attract top employees, lead to financial success, and enable to grow a business exponentially. Your Purpose should be reflected in your day-to-day operations and how you treat customers, employees, communities, and colleagues, not just shareholders.
Identifying your needs to achieve your Purpose will help you focus your efforts and resources on what is most critical to your success. Once you have identified your needs, create an action plan to address them. Improving organizational structure, processes, and culture is critical to enabling growth and innovation. Please determine what you need to drive growth, whether it’s cash, the right people, or relationships, and anticipate potential obstacles that could get in the way. Finally, identify risks and challenges that may arise during the transformation process and ensure your customers remain satisfied and loyal throughout the journey.
Foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation to sustain your growth in the long run. Hold yourself accountable and stay focused on your goals. Remember, success is not just about financial gain; it’s about offering better experiences to all stakeholders.
To live by its purpose and achieve its vision, ValTech needs to act on several fronts. First, the company must invest in developing its employees’ skills and expertise in emerging technologies, hiring new talents as needed, and building partnerships with other companies specializing in these areas. Second, ValTech must improve its organizational structure, processes, and culture to enable growth and innovation. This includes implementing agile development methodologies, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement, and providing an environment that encourages innovation and creativity.
For example, automation could streamline processes, data analytics to gain insights into customer needs, and machine learning to create personalized customer experiences. To fully transform into an ExO by leveraging the power of technology. ValTech could create a platform that allows them to customize and maintain software for small to mid-size organizations. Furthermore, this platform should be designed to be scalable and easily accessible, allowing the company to provide services to its customers quickly and efficiently.
Finally, ValTech needs to anticipate potential challenges and market changes to achieve its vision, such as competition from more prominent and established companies, changing customer needs, and disruptive technologies. By identifying and addressing these challenges early on, ValTech can stay ahead of the curve and continue to grow exponentially.
To hold itself accountable, ValTech will establish clear goals, objectives, and key results, measure progress regularly and solicit customer and employee feedback. By doing so, the company can ensure that it stays on track and continues to provide high-quality and customized IT solutions to its clients.
Take-home value
By embracing business transformation and a culture of innovation, a small to mid-size organization can achieve exponential growth and remain competitive in the ever-evolving digital world. By holding oneself accountable, anticipating obstacles, and taking action, such as securing cash, building relationships, and hiring the right people, a business can create a roadmap for growth and achieve its vision of success in the long term.
Call to action
Start by exploring how change might affect your business, create a Massive Transformative Purpose, and ideate how you can reinvent your stakeholders’ experiences, internal processes, and business model to become a platform business. Furthermore, make it a fun learning experience!
Customers were joining the Zoom conference for our advisory call. As I got to know new ecosystem participants, one of the potential consultants enquired, “how can my customers build their platforms?”
I welcomed the question, which addressed my opening statement to them.
“Many people mistake a platform with a piece of technology, such as a mobile app or a website, but a platform is more than just software. It is a comprehensive business model that generates value by connecting consumers and producers.”
A successful platform business must attract participants, make it easy for people to connect, and foster member exchange and co-creation. We believe four strategic challenges should be addressed for a platform business to prosper.
Determine the consumer and producer sides of your platform.
Resolve the chicken or egg conundrum: how to get volume from multiple sides?
Create your business model – who pays, who does not, and where are the profits.
Create and enforce ecosystem rules. Who should have the authority to do what?
How to make possible a successful B2B Platform business?
We think the Exponential Organization (ExO) framework helps to answer the question. A Massive Transformative Purpose that pulls a community, fosters connections and gives the members something to rally around is necessary for a successful B2B platform business. Additionally, the right combination of internal and external ExO attributes is needed. Our professional experience has shown us that a platform may be enabled by integrating the blueprints for Community-Engagement-Experimentation and Algorithms-Interfaces-Experimentation.
ExO Attributes Platform Business
Community-Engagement-Experimentation blueprint
When someone suggested making Miami a tech hub on Twitter in December 2020, Mayor Suarez replied, “How can I help?” It sparked a rush of movement.
A “how can I help?” mindset and culture are essential to understanding your community’s needs and engaging the members to generate experiments and eventually scale. Starting small and moving fast using your community for insights, ideation, and product adoption truly help to test and pivot your own platform business and help to match the pivot of your customers.
Early in the formation of the Openexo and yWhales communities, moderators played a crucial role in seeding discussions and responding to customer posts. Later both communities started to focus on content to drive traffic to their community, pulling and pushing the flow of visitors from outside sources. Ultimately, activation or engagement is about getting that buy-in from new users and encouraging regular activity in the community.
Engagement is essential for getting as many people through the activation funnel as possible and developing a solid community of loyal, engaged super-users and ambassadors. Without these individuals, the community would not have as much content for people at the top of the activation funnel to enjoy!
Algorithms-Interfaces-Experimentation
I remember the first time I visited the Airbnb website in 2014; I was captivated by its simplicity and clarity. Their messages and call to action connected with my needs and got my attention.
In a B2B platform business, the Interfaces refer to how the community will interact with your company. Therefore, before designing your interface, you need to identify the sources of abundance you are accessing, think about how to humanize the user experience, create standardized processes, and apply algorithms to automate processes. Finally, you need to test the interfaces with your community members and update those interfaces regularly based on the results of your experiments.
Additionally, the interfaces should offer unique digital experiences. For example, gamification tools like user ranks, badges, reputation indicators, and likes are excellent ways to engage customers and drive them along the sales funnel.
Final thoughts
To conclude, we want to reveal some practical recommendations we learned from the mistakes we made when creating B2B communities, mistakes you should not make.
Start small and move fast instead of making a “big bang” launch.
Don’t concentrate only on technology.
Expecting your community to entirely replace your marketing or customer service is unrealistic.
Avoid leaving your community to “self-regulate.”
Avoid misinterpreting the true motivations of your community members.
ExO attributes are essential only if connected to your business model; developing your business model is the key. Platform businesses have the potential to tip your market due to economies of scale, but they can also result in significant financial loss.
We value your feedback because we enjoy learning new things.
Tokens are allowing innovators to capture economic value in open ecosystems. Therefore, Web 3 is creating the incentive structures required to solve the world’s biggest problems.
A few weeks ago, a colleague reached out to one of my networks to share her Analysis of How Blockchain Technology Could Facilitate Citizen Disruption of Innovation[1]. I took the opportunity to chat with her about how to leverage distributed innovation.
More recently, after listening to “5 Mental Models for Web 3.0 [2]” I had an Aha moment. My daughter who loves writing told me that she learned that “if you want something to exist, write it down.” I decided to write my insights about distributed innovation.
Everyone is sharing more knowledge at faster speeds and has more broadband at a lower cost. “The world is getting faster, and the power you have to change the world is getting greater.” [3]
Our lives are changing and will change even more: not in twenty or thirty years but now. Our future is arriving faster because technology continues advancing at an exponential pace. Due to abundance, not only nations or corporations, have access to plenty of talent, capital, data, and communication. As a result, we are increasing our capabilities while collaborating with people and machines.
The Internet is evolving into a third phase, the Web 3. During the coming years, even successful digital companies and platforms created as part of the sharing economy will be disrupted by the new decentralized peer2peer based business models.
To understand why digital companies will undergo disruption it is important to know that during Web 1, we made information available everywhere and instantaneous; personal and content websites and user consuming information disrupted news media, and music, among other industries. In Web 2, we enabled creators and individuals to participate and share their creations and content via podcasting, blogging, social networking, and social media on mobile-first platforms.
Now, in Web 3, developers are creating a digital property, decentralized finance, and unique non-fungible digital assets. As a result, we are disintermediating industries, protecting our data, and evolving networks and platforms into economies where all participants receive part of the value they contribute to creating.
Digital trust is enabling abundance and bringing back scarcity to the digital world. More precisely, Bitcoin is the first scarce digital object the world has ever seen. Furthermore, NFTs and blockchain technology managed to bring scarcity to the digital world by giving value to the original file rather than by trying to prevent (and prohibit) copying that file [4].
Web 3.0 is the Internet of value already disrupting the banking industry, the internet of energy, and the logistics internet altogether. The conjunction of technologies such as blockchain, AI (Artificial Intelligence), sensors/IoT, and 3D printing, combined with other economic and cultural phenomena such as the sharing economy and crowdfunding mechanisms are driving our new world.
We are at a turning point in how we harness technology and innovation.
A new phase of innovation is upon us. It is much faster than the rapid adoption of smartphones and social networks during Web 2. Nowadays, most of the population has access to information, distributed gig-workers, and experiences via their smartphones.
Web 3 projects use staff on demand, community, and a crowd-based mechanism to fund and support their ideas via crypto tokens. These tokens have been used as means of exchange, store of value, access to services, and more recently they have been used to govern projects, incentivize behaviors, and recognize community members. Furthermore, the NFTs (not-fungible-tokens) now represent digital collectibles in art, music, and games. For example, participants of the Axie game perform tasks that add value to their ecosystem, and they are rewarded with a digital asset in the form of NFTs that can be sold and converted into an income stream. Tokens are allowing innovators to capture economic value in open ecosystems.
Therefore, Web 3 is creating the incentive structures required to solve the world’s biggest problems. The access to technology and resources not previously available is unlocking intelligent and innovative people worldwide to solve their biggest problems, moreover, these people have dealt with the problems they are trying to fix for years and are therefore more motivated than companies or governments who have pledged to fix them. Additionally, very soon we will have trillions of machines and individuals connected to the Internet that will, in many cases, communicate and transact among them without human interaction.
Distributed Innovation
Together with Fluid Chains, we have been launching high-impact businesses with exponential scaling on top of the distributed innovation trend during the past five years. We have embraced the open-source movement and we have enabled cities and communities to co-create token economies. In addition, we have built distributed ledger platforms for the creator’s economy, launched decentralized services, and built Proof of Concepts within fintech, energy, logistics, health, and other industries.
We know that successful blockchain or distributed ledger projects are Exponential Organizations by design and require a distributed innovation approach. They harness Community, Algorithms, and Engagement attributes to connect with abundance, and scale through Interfaces, Experiments, Autonomy, and Social ExO [5] attributes.
In the new world of Web 3.0, no one can afford to be self-sufficient. We need to bring together more and better resources than those we can have inside our organizations. We should attract the best people to collaborate on our projects. Thus, to attract elite members to participate and create value, it is essential to offer them a fair share of the value created.
To succeed in an era where networks are becoming economies, and where it is challenging to negotiate based on differing objectives, risk appetite, and power, we need to be open and learn new models and approaches.
We need to be agile, learn fast and fail fast; we need to organize work effectively in communities and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) through Massive Transformative purposes (MTP).
We need to leverage a culture of autonomy driven by a growth mindset and a clear purpose. It is essential to embrace social tools and decentralized governance as vehicles for asynchronous collaboration, and decision-making among diverse groups of individuals working online with no centralized leadership.
Web 1 websites started as news boards, catalogs, and directories; then became portals, mail services, and e-commerce. Today they are social networks, Software as a Services (SaaS), and sharing economies platforms. Web 3 digital tokens are the new website in our wallets’ addresses the new access credentials, moving forward, we will see more and more use cases we are not imaging today.
How can you help your business tap into this unprecedented access to innovation and harness it for benefit?
Based on my experience, I recommend educational and experiential learning. The leadership and the functional teams need to gain a new mindset, leadership skills, and capabilities. I strongly suggest participating in one of the thousands of Web 3 projects solving specific problems related to your industry or your personal passions. You can start by joining their communities and experimenting to learn with everyone else.
Another good idea is to bring experts to help you and your team identify transformational initiatives that enhance your organization’s current business model. They can also help to identify distributed innovative projects that could potentially disrupt your business and your industry.
You should be open to partnering with incubators and accelerators and even investing in Web 3 projects that have already found market-fit for a problem/solution aligned with your organization’s purpose.
We are writing down our future, be the first to write it. Those who arrive first will be rewarded, the laggards will fall behind. This thought was brought by teaching my grandfather passed to me many years ago “el que pega primero, pega dos veces.“
Are you planning to leverage distributed innovation in your business today? How will you do it? I’d love to continue the conversation.
[1] Article Published at RollingStone.com
[2] Bankless Podcast with Chris Dixon
[3] Peter Diamandis, best-selling author, public speaker, and philanthropist
