If you speak to anyone in marketing, branding, or communications within the Web3 space, they’re all likely to nod to at least one or more brands they’ve historically worked with that showed all the obvious signs of having an identity crisis.
You see, this shouldn’t really come as a surprise.
For any brand — from traditional firms to modern start-ups — having a kick-ass brand identity and tone of voice is pretty rare, but it’s the one thing that can change a product’s position from being simply useful, to immeasurably powerful.
Now, this would be the cue for a Steve Jobs quote and a reference to Apple’s wildly successful branding — but we’re not going to do that, because I’m not actually here to talk about branding.
“Why the explicitly focused intro, then?” I hear you cry. And I’ll tell you.
The thing is, while most traditional brands yearn to prosper with a strong and compelling brand, many in the Web3 space today are lagging behind their Web2 counterparts, and it’s having a really tough effect on the industry’s growth.
Ledger’s fiasco last month was not down to a brand identity crisis, but, in order to understand what the issue was, this must be our starting point.
Web3 Brands Haven’t a Clue Who They Are
Disclaimer: Some do. Many don’t.
One of the first rules of branding is to build the personified version of your product, the soul of its being, if you will.
Web3 has seen immense growth over the past decade, with a lot of new projects hitting the scene, and many of them taking off to the moon.
As an inherently technical industry, this immense and imminent growth resulted in a lot of projects launching to market with a predominantly technical team, focused simply on building a “good product.” This resulted in a lot of new products hitting the market with little thought as to how they look, feel, and connect with an audience.
In the early days, though, this wasn’t really an issue — a tech-oriented team presenting products to a tech-oriented audience seemingly worked quite well, hence the number of unicorns — like Uniswap — that had a pretty poor user experience in their earlier successful versions.
You see, the problem came later. As with any bull run, new adopters appear in the ecosystem, keen to try out the best applications available in the space. Great, right?
Well, probably better if you’re ready for it.
So as Web3 became more and more desirable to wider audiences who were a little less tech-focused and a little more used to their pocket-friendly Web2 apps, the industry seemingly hit a pretty big dilemma:
Nobody could actually use their applications.
As with any industry, of course what followed next was a Darwinian battle to build the greatest Web3 app for mainstream adoption ahead of the next bull run, and that more or less brings us to where we are today.
But, brands don’t just have the issue of UX on their hands if they’re to meet the standards that wider audiences are used to — they need to up their branding game too.
Much like the UX dilemma, when a lot of technically-oriented projects hit the market, it seems they may have skipped a session on branding, too.
Touching back on our earlier point, a brand isn’t a way for projects to show off their grandiose ideas — it’s an emotive and powerful tool used to actually engage and create a connection with an audience. Having a lot of earlier projects built with a lower priority focus on this, what we’re faced with today is an overflowing ecosystem of really cool tech, but nobody to use it.
A lot of projects today know exactly what they’ve built, and exactly why they’ve built it, yet, they have absolutely no idea how they’re meant to sell it.
And that right there, is Web3’s brand identity crisis.
The Industry’s Consumer Dilemma
Picasso didn’t get his name by writing up the shade of paint and millimeter of the paintbrush he used for his work, so why do Web3 brands feel compelled to overshare the technicalities and underlying functions of their project over any emotive aspects?
Well, actually, they’ve had pretty good reason to.
You see, that heavy tech audience we keep circling back to pretty much made the industry what it is today, thanks to their loyalty and dedication to decentralization. Fundamental as their contributions were, their overwhelming presence in the evolution of the industry is the very thing that has placed it in a critical consumer dilemma as we move toward the next phase of growth.
The early adopters of Web3 have been through it all, yet, they’re still with us today. They’re here because they truly believe in the opportunity the industry presents, and they believe in decentralization. So much so, for many old-timers in the space, the more decentralized a product is the better — no matter how much things like usability are compromised.
This desire for more decentralization was a pretty huge factor as to why so many loyal Ledger users were left feeling unhappy with the project’s announcement of a new recovery feature that would enable users to regain their private keys last month. But it wasn’t just that.
You see, even maximalists know that if we’re ever to go mainstream, we must improve adaptability across the board — and storing seed phrases and maintaining private keys is a far cry from consumer friendly.
The thing that really kicked the can wasn’t building an “off-brand” feature only really fit for an entirely new market, it was their product positioning, consumer consciousness, and communication surrounding that feature.
By pushing to market the way they did, they presented long-term, loyal users with these questions:
- What actually is Ledger?
- What do they actually care about?
- Who are they actually building for?
In doing so, they uprooted many of the trusted foundations they had managed to set over the years, and established a colossal wedge between themselves and the users who helped them become the brand they are today. In addition, they barely seemed to touch the wider market that the product should have been most appealing to.
Here’s the thing — Ledger is fighting the good fight. Now, they’re ramping up their efforts to help drive the next wave of adoption. But, in positioning this the way that they did, they failed to recognize their market and effectively engage their consumers. Their consumer consciousness in the decision to push this to market felt overwhelmingly negligent.
Why Ledger Shouldn’t Be The Scapegoat
Though the attempted launch was considered a pretty big failure, Ledger’s faux pas was not entirely their fault.
Yes, they should have thought about the product positioning. They should have thought about the emotive response their existing users would have, and they should have thought about how to properly market the product to the intended audience, but we’ll leave that one to them.
The thing is, Ledger’s gross misdirection of messaging and lack of consumer consciousness boils back down to the same issue we’re seeing surface time and time again in the space.
The industry is growing. More diverse consumers with wider-spanning needs are adopting our technology, and while this is fantastic — it’s exactly what we hoped would happen — too many brands have no idea how to grow with it while maintaining their existing position within the ecosystem.
The goal is to enable a globally adoptable Web3.
Maximalists will never have the same requirements as my neighbor Bill, but, the industry needs to cater to them both — and it’s up to brands to make that happen.
In order to do that successfully, brands need to reconnect with their identity and adopt their own consumer consciousness, otherwise, we’re going to be seeing a lot more fiascos and a lot less impactful growth.
While this may mean compromising some aspects of technology to improve on others, the idea of creating a decentralized ecosystem was not to enforce decentralization, but to dismantle forced centralization, was it not?
There’s no reason Ledger cannot have a branch of the brand that speaks to wider, less advanced audiences while maintaining the same core mission and keeping their promises to their earlier loyal users, but chucking it all in the mix together and hoping for the best was always going to be a recipe for disaster.
In order for us to move forward, brands have got to realize this cautionary tale is much closer to home, and therefore, must take their next steps with a true consideration towards the value of consumer consciousness.