Crypto branding is important to gain mass adaption of the start-ups’ blockchain technologies and to sustain crypto business in metaverse.
B for Branding
Branding is often underestimated or thought as if it is just finding a name and a fancy logo for your business. However, it is much more that. Brand strategies for growing your business more important than your products and than your ideas. It is the value that sells your products, enables the growth to your business.
Your company branding has its own presence, time and life which can still continue to live long after you, your ideas. However it should build on a solid ground and open to evolve with the generations. Otherwise, the collapse is inevitable.
In the physical world, most of the companies know this truth and invest their branding more than products. By creating a brand value, adaptable to the generations, brands live for centuries. They sold their products to our great grandmothers, to our mothers, to us and now to our children and maybe to our grandchildren. There is a way to make this happen. It’s called 360-degree branding.
C for Crypto Branding
In the digital world, precisely in cryptoeconomy & metaverse, most of the ‘crypto brands’ think that firing rocket emoji (?) is enough to create a brand value in Gen Z and Alpha. However, this thought is so for the ‘boomers’! The most valuable asset of any crypto company is their identity & branding.
Cryptoeconomy & metaverse are often resembled to the early days of the internet, if that’s the case in order to be ‘Google’, ‘Yahoo’ or ‘Amazon’, crypto companies should invest their branding strategies.
Regardless of your technology, your product won’t be a hype by itself, you need crypto branding.
But how? What is a successful crypto branding? How we can create a value and hype in crytoeconomics by using branding? Why crypto marketing matters in terms of getting investors? What will be the next ‘‘Google’’ of the tokenization?
Key Points for Crypto Branding & Crypto Marketing
Well, here are some key elements and examples:
1.Brand positioning, name, mottos, keywords, hashtags and colors for crypto companies
2.Brand storytelling for crypto companies
3.Brand persona for crypto companies
4.Brand ambassadors for crypto companies
5.Brand awareness with marketing strategies for crypto companies
6.Social media management of the brand for crypto companies
7.Sub-brand creations for crypto companies
8.Brand merchandise for crypto companies
9.Brand collaborations for crypto companies
1. Brand positioning, name, mottos, keywords, hashtags and colors for crypto companies
Philip Kotler defines brand positioning as “the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market”. Therefore, crypto brands should think their positioning in the market by analyzing their target customers, competitors and their capabilities.
After making crypto brand positioning in the crypto market, the name, mottos, keywords, hashtags and colors of the crypto branding should be decided. For example,
- $Doge is positioned in MemeCoin crypto ecosystem. With its name, motto and keywords such as #DoOnlyGoodEveryday, #DogeArmy and its mustard-yellow color, Dogecoin developed their crypto branding base.
- At this point it all can be seen as a ”coincidence” or ”a magical touch of Elon Musk”, however it is more than that. It takes a branding power to create an hype.
2. Brand storytelling for crypto companies
- StudentCoin ($STC) is the first crypto platform that allows users to easily design, create, and manage personal, #start-up, #NFT, and #DeFi tokens. A student creates their personal token to get a decentralized student loan and pay their tuition at a promising university.
- While StudentCoin explain their targets, they turn this into a storytelling strategy by explaining their long-term goals for the students.
Brand persona for crypto companies refers to a set of human characteristics that are attributed to a crypto brand. With this way, we find the ideal targets for our crypto marketing.
If we think your crypto brand as a human, then you should answer these questions:
- What does your crypto brand likes to do as hobbies? Playing video games, basketball or golf?
- What does your crypto brand do on the weekends? Gathering with friends at the local pub, going to movies, meditation?
- Where they shop? From luxury designer brands or fast fashion brands?
- The answers of these kind of questions are very important since they help us to determine the starting point of marketing and brand growing strategies.
For example,
- Developer company of VR experiences, CEEK collaborated with H&M for #metaverse shopping.
- Concept VR store presented to H&M by #CEEK Creating mainstream use cases for $CEEK + scaling #Virtualreality beyond games.
- So if $CEEK were a person, she/he can shop from H&M an this knowledge opens multiple marketing and collaboration strategies. Also, CEEK increase its brand value and brand awareness with H&M.
4. Brand ambassadors for crypto companies
This is a influencer’s world,
But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a brand or a value.
Crypto brand ambassadors represent the face of your company, of your beliefs, of your values. They are very important to increasing or decreasing your crypto brand image and values. If they do wrong in their personal lives, or say the wrong thing in the social media, it is immediately matched with your brand’s voice and affect your brand reputation. This can also be vice versa. Any good thing that they do regardless of your crypto brand, can be seen a positive outcome for you.
For example,
- $Doge’s brand ambassador, as we all know is Elon Musk.
- All of his activities in Twitter have strong influence on Doge Community and Doge’s price. Musk tweets “Doge” in reference to a cryptocurrency based on a popular internet meme.
- He later tweeted, “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto.” and “I am become meme, Destroyer of shorts.” Dogecoin surged more than 60%. Actually, we can state that Elon is an ambassador for crypto market.
To give a couple of examples:
- Jan. 29, 2021: Musk added “#bitcoin” to his Twitter bio, driving a 14% surge in the largest cryptocurrency.
- June 4, 2021: Bitcoin fell more than 7% after Musk tweeted “#Bitcoin”, a broken-heart emoji and a picture of a couple discussing a break.
5. Brand awareness with marketing strategies for crypto companies
Brand awareness is a general term that describes how familiar (aware) consumers are with a brand or its products. Crypto brand awareness is the measure of how memorable and recognizable a brand is to its target audience. To be able to stay in the crypto economy, your brand should differentiate in terms of branding and marketing. If we give an example for this when we say fast food, directly McDonalds comes our minds. Or there is blue box with a turquoise color ton that reminds us immediately Tiffany & Co.
Crypto brands should build brand awareness and marketing strategies for all kind of audiences. It should be developed as a way that even the children should want to buy your coin when they become grown-ups and make money.
As an example,
- You’re interested in cryptoecnomoics and when you walk on the street you saw a dog, precisely a Shiba Inc breed.
- What do you think of instantly, $Doge or $Shib?
- Well, our answer would be $Doge. Because $Doge provide its brand awareness with its meme, the Shiba Inu dog.
- In order to support your brand awareness or build it from the scratch, you should first decide your brand values and create marketing strategies around it. The most working marketing strategies will be explained in the following titles.
6.Social media management of the brand for crypto companies
The importance of social media for crypto businesses’ branding & marketing activities is no secret. Companies using Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok and other platforms could be the key for mass adaption. However social media strategy of crypto brands should be managed professionally resecting brand values and marketing strategies.
For crypto ecosystem top social media platform undoubtedly is Twitter & Discord. That’s why crypto companies should build their branding in these platforms professionally. Otherwise, it will definitely have negative impact on branding.
For example,
- On September 16, 2021 Swipe ($SXP) Twitter account was suspended.
- Swipe team spent the past weeks filing for appeal for restoration of the account.
- This suspension led crypto communities to several rightful questions about whether Swipe will shut down its business or it is a scam project.
- Swipe team forced to open a new account and tried to manage this crisis.
- On December 30, 2021 Binance announced that they fully acquired Swipe and rebranded it as Solar. This was a very strategic decision and underlines the power of crypto rebranding.
7.Sub-brand creations for crypto companies
Sub-branding is essential in business structures when a main brand creates a subsidiary or secondary brand. Sub-brands can be created as an opportunity to create a difference, to reach a different audience, to start a new conversation and to build a new income source. It also reduces the risks of having only one brand. For crypto branding, companies often create new brands in their ecosystem for different functions.
For example,
- VeChain’s platform makes use of cryptocurrencies. It’s impossible to use VeChain’s services without having the native cryptocurrency Vechain ($VET). This is also an advanced strategy in selling VET to the public.
- Also, it’s impossible to transact VET without having gas fees, and these gas fees are paid using VeThor ($VTHO).
- Before any transaction can occur on the platform or any VeChain’s services, every user must have VET and VTHO.
- While VET and VTHO work hand-in-hand, it’s essential to note that they have unique features and differences.
8.Brand merchandise for crypto companies
Branded merchandise is any product that contains a name or a logo of a brand. These merchandises are very important for creating crypto brand loyalty, crypto brand visibility and generating extra income for our businesses. Also, while selling crypto brand merchandise, companies can use their cryptocurrencies as a payment method. This enables the real usage of their coins or tokens.
As an example,
- The Dallas Mavericks, an American professional basketball team based in Dallas, accepts $Doge in payments of their merchandises.
- Another example showing how you can generate money from merchandise is The Boring Company.
- In order to raise fund for their hyper loop project, The Boring Company produced hats with company logo and sell them.
- 50,000 of these hats sold, and at $20 a piece, they generated $1 million in sales.
The most important factor for merchandise is the quality of the product and the design. Cheap materials and sloppy designs will show your crypto brand cheap, too. This is why 360 degree branding is important. It gives your brand value consistency.
9.Brand collaborations for crypto companies
Last but definitely not least, the most important branding & marketing element is collaborations. Today, for crypto brand collaborations two or more businesses team up, create something unique and help each other grow in the process.
Collaboration for the same goal with exclusive strategies contributes brand image, brand values and brands’ targets.
- These collaborations doesn’t necessarily make with two or multiple brands in the same sector. On the contrary, if it’s make with different sector brands, it adds more value with different audiences.
- Recently, fashion and art brands team up with crypto brands and blockchain companies in order to discover their places in metaverse: $Sand x adidas, $Ceek x H&m, $Xtz (Tezos) x Art Basel Miami.
- Metaverse platform the Sandbox’s $Sand token surges 25% after adidas teases partnership.
