It’s Time to Build: Builder Roundtable, Brands 3.0
Author:
- Samantha Stevens (Product Guild Co-Lead)
Boys Club hosted our first Builder Roundtable this week, bringing together 11 masterminds working with brands from various industries to discuss “Brands 3.0”. Here are 5 hot takes from the Boys:
Creators are brands, brands are creators.
As creators increasingly cultivate religious-like levels of dedicated fans and build out businesses around their creations, they are beginning to attract the same level of obsession as the world’s most beloved brands. Both creators and brands shape culture, and the right cultural moment will drive a cataclysmic shift of mass adoption into web3. We will all be waiting for that moment we all remember — like when we sent our first Facebook poke or watched our first streaming movie on Netflix to cross the chasm into web3. This shift towards fans-as-owners presents an entirely new model for people to interact with, show support, and share success and co-create with their favorite brands and creators in ways that were never possible before.
Communities are the new boy bands.
Something interesting has happened with the advent of NFT-based communities, where passionate members have started to become “brand ambassadors” for the group. Through both online personas (profile pics, avatars, twitter bios) and offline identify (clothing, events) members are visually repping their communities just as they would their favorite brands, artists, and celebrities. (Boys Club is the new BTS, you heard it here first).
Tokens for the cold start, community for the warm heart.
Token ownership is a great way for brands to jumpstart a web3 community, and bring together folks to rally around a shared goal. A community rooted in shared ownership is a super powerful vehicle to motivate a cohort of people who align with what the brand stands for. We’ve seen especially great traction in this area for mission-driven brands. Tokens work well when there’s an immediate group of owners to share upside with, but alone are not enough to develop lasting relationships and loyalty. Communities need to be intentionally built and curated, and brands deliver valuable connections amongst their members in order to activate them and nurture their continued fandom.
Stay loyal, my friends.
There is a very exciting opportunity for brands to dip their toe into web3 through tokenizing their loyalty programs. Loyalty programs are a tried and true method of driving LTV and retaining customers, but are expensive and unpredictable for companies to issue and manage. Blockchain technology presents a unique opportunity to allow customers, employees, and partners to unlock the power of their membership, reduce acquisition costs, and understand which membership perks work the best with brands. We’re excited to watch companies like Project Venkman unlock this space.
Analyze this.
There’s no version of the internet where data is not a valuable currency. Web3 gives us the opportunity to rethink who profits from that currency. We all know right now the big tech companies are the sole beneficiaries of user data, making billions a year selling that to advertisers. But in a blockchain-based world where data is public and technology is being built to analyze it, we should be rethinking how users get to benefit from choosing to participate in this system. There’s a balance that companies will need to strike between an individual’s consent/agency and the user experience of seeing content you are most likely to be interested in. It comes down to who profits from that data, and how companies can build ethical, fair, and mutually profitable solutions. There are exciting emerging models around the future of marketing and advertising (such as the Brave browser’s Basic Attention Token) as well as blockchain analytics, and we’ll be keeping an eye on this evolution.
Thanks for reading along! If you want to build with us, join us at: https://boysclub.vip/
