Welcome to The Summarin - a Modern Marketing Playbook, collecting the most interesting ideas, topics, and tweets from the past week at the intersection of tech, media, and commerce.
In today's edition (26.2.22):
Brands are rushing to protect their IP in web3
Culture as currency
The evolution of Shopify
Read and listen:
Value Transformation
By Marin Gerov
The ways in which consumers and companies view value is changing in front of our eyes. Driven by digital innovations such as web3, brands are in a race to secure their presence in the new crypto-based world. Owners of intellectual property are already hard at work to protect their identity and assets in the context of web3. The fight is on for the exploitation of value on the blockchain.
Meanwhile, culture, especially among Gen Z and younger generations, is aggressively being financialized. Collections, taste, desirability are becoming forms of cultural currency. This is giving rise to new business and value-generating models. Consumers are no longer trading in euros or dollars only. The exchange of cultural artifacts have become just as accepted units of accounts as cash is.
The playbook of modern marketing is being written right now in front of our eyes. The pioneers are obscure entities, often with pseudonymous identities, but strong communities around them. Small-scale operators, steeped in culture and armed with the tools as well as organic insight to generate hype machines are turning culture and business upside down.
Here's Why Brands From McDonald's to Walmart are Gobbling Up Metaverse Trademarks (Decrypt)
While the legitimacy of web3 is still being debated among pundits and armchair philosophers, corporations are scrambling to adapt to a new reality that few would have predicted a few years ago. The seriousness is such that companies are going through a forced digital transformation in order to protect their individual property. The smart ones are building up their portfolio of digital property already by accumulating assets and partnering with web3 pioneering organizations. While the fight for digital supremacy is going on, another fight is going on the legal front - making sure that their brand is protected in this new crypto world. Coincidentally, one of the benefits of NFT technology is the ability to prove the ownership of digital assets. The actual IP owners are now seriously investing in strategies to make sure they claim what is rightfully theirs. Read story
Cortiez Goods (The Sociology of Business)
“Cortiez Bolo opened up a new exchange market, where the most valuable thing of recognized global brands is measured in whether they can be exchanged for a Bolo. Like cryptocurrencies, Bolo is a unit of exchange.”
Cultural currency is a fascinating concept. In a world where collections and collecting become the ultimate expression of identity, having the most cultural relevant assets becomes a necessity. In turn, this necessity leads to higher desirability. Practitioners of modern marketing should ask themselves the question: How is this cultural shift going to change my brand, products, relationships with customers, my community? Ana Andjelic explores this conundrum with the example of Cortiez Goods and their unique model for generating hype, as well as harnessing of the phenomenon that is the financialization of culture. Read story
Money is a story we tell ourselves about value, status and position. (Seth Godin)
Shopify’s Evolution (Stratechery)
If you operate in the retail space, this one is a must read. Likewise, if you are interested in strategy. For the regular readers of the Summarin, you may have noticed that I am a big supporter and believer in Shopify. The e-commerce platform has provided the foundation for the emergence of the direct to consumer (DTC) trend in retail over the last five years. Still a founder-led company, Shopify’s growth is due to major cultural shifts, the rise of entrepreneurship, but it is also largely connected to the effectiveness of online advertising by Meta and Google. If it was not for the advertising platforms of those two behemoths, the emergence of the DTC success stories would not have been so prominent. With the focus of Big Tech turning towards privacy and every platform tightening the grip of data-sharing across devices, it has become harder and pricier to acquire new customers for brands running on Shopify. This has resulted in focus on first-party data and the potential of Shopify launching their own advertising solutions. Read story
Tweets
That’s all for this week. Have a good week(end)!
Marin