Manhattan, New York, November 2022
“-We could call it ‘community osmosis’ or something. I’m not sure yet. But it’s the playing field for brands in web 3.0.”
For being a renowned innovator and international brand pioneer, Oscar Eriksson is refreshingly informal in his way of talking strategy. We had a sit down to pick his mind around the “web3.0” future of branding during the Digital Summit of 2022.
In your recent keynote you mentioned “augmented marketing” as a concept. Can you elaborate on that?
Essentially, I wanted to showcase that as a brand, you don’t need to take some binary leap into the “unknown” metaverse or web3 spaces in order to try new marketing formats and technology. In this case, I exemplified the new functionality within the Meta platforms that allows you to actually create an augmented version of your product that will show up as an in-feed ad for example. This enables an immersive, interactive experience for the consumer to engage with your product directly in their mobile, through the augmentation lens.
This is exciting to me since these previously quite mysterious concepts permeating next-gen marketing are now turned into actual products and services delivered by the platforms, to be used by brands in an intuitive way. So nearly anyone can start playing around with augmented reality tomorrow. This both lowers psychological barriers to try new technologies, and it creates some sort of nice middle-step between traditional digital branding and the “futuristic” full-blown metaverse space.
Speaking of web3.0 – what does it mean for brands, according to you?
To answer that, I believe you first need to take a step back and get a sense of the new playing field. I believe this is a market-dynamic change based on the new technology and behavioral patterns that follow it. Zooming out a bit, what we will see in web3 is a new age where information sharing is re-defined. “Web 2.0” was all about us more or less willingly or knowingly sharing data to tech giants and companies at scale. The truth is that user data has been used in a way that users simply have not agreed to, but that’s for another discussion. With this information, corporations could create at-scale, self-improving data used to create audiences, cohorts and personas to clinically target “top-down” with the right messaging, placement, timing and frequency.
So, the idea of web3 is much more about privacy and ownership of your personal data to begin with, right? I think that’s rather clear by now. Users owning their data is a huge shift in the rules of the game. So that’s one part of this shift.
The second big shift is that we’re moving from a concept; “Internet” as a huge global thing. Sure, it has always had micro communities. But the switch will be towards a universal infrastructure of “micro internets” – an endless number of communities, places and spaces. Where people engage with each other on their own terms.
So less available consumer-data and an endless number of communities, that sounds like a paradigm shift?
I’d agree with that. To your initial question, I think the challenges for a brand in this reality could be boiled down to 3 key ones.
The first shift has to do with identity design. With this community-at-scale structure, I don’t believe you can approach marketing in web3.0 as a “messenger-receiver relationship”. You actually need to get involved with the niche communities that have been built within respective spaces. You’ll need to become an authentic persona among them.
So “marketing” and “branding” actually becomes an interaction on the same level as the consumer, instead of a traditional megaphone screaming down to people. It goes from vertical to horizontal. So how do you enter a community and relate to its peers on an emotional and honest level? How do you build trust as a peer?
The “web2” brand-identifiers such as price point, colors, tone of voice, font, look and so on are not what define you in web3. You need in some sense re-design your brand identity and ethos if you’re truly entering this space. Normally, what brings us together are values, ideas, creating memorable moments and emotions, helping each other out and creating or validating a sense of value within another. These are probably the new tools for your brand identity toolkit.
The second big impact for brands could also become something as fundamental as identifying your target market. Continuing on the theme of “identity” – now you also have a similar challenge in terms of the consumer’s identity. How do you know who you are targeting when the “real” personas are getting blurred into different, infinite virtual spaces? It will take some serious creativity when it comes to targeting and you will probably have to work more based on places, communities and what’s going on within them, instead of “traditional” targeting based on demo- or psychographics.
The third major strategic shift in my view, will be how we measure our brand presence and the success of our marketing initiatives. We’ve been using quite standardized metrics such as CPM, CPC, CTR, First-Impression-Rate, Frequency, Retention and several blended versions of these metrics for a decade now. But now you need to measure to what extent your brand creates real emotions and connections in a horizontal environment. How trusted, relevant and natural are you among your web3-communities? What will we call this, and how do we measure it? We could call it “community osmosis” or something. I’m not sure yet. But it’s the playing field for brands in web 3.0. It’s probably going to be the key KPI looking ahead.
All these things are fundamentally changing, and you almost need to throw your current playbook out the window. It’s a fundamental shift in mindset, which will affect strategy, planning, targets and what KPI’s to actually measure success through.
So how urgent is this shift for brands in terms of positioning and presence?
Honestly, I think this might be one of those situations where you want to watch and learn a bit first. I’m not sure there is an obvious first-mover advantage in this space, necessarily. You could scan the environment and draw inspiration from other brands. And different demographics will adapt at different speeds. It might even be so that the space isn’t ready for your product or offering just yet.
However, look at a consumer product like sneakers for example. It’s a relatively easy product to showcase creatively, together with interesting people and concepts in a digital world. It’s a product with a lot of culture, history and passion among the consumer base. It’s a playful field with all different generations moving within it. It naturally belongs to pop culture, meaning that you over time can build stories and experiences. So it’s not very surprising that a brand like NIKE acquires RTFKT to make the quick move. But I see that there are several industries or product categories that might not be there just yet.
This is why I mentioned the “lower fruit” tech solutions such as the augmented ads – perfect smaller steps for ambitious brands to start understanding the possibilities and gather valuable feedback loops from the market’s adoption of these features. There are some exciting times ahead though, that’s for sure.
