A Tuesday morning pep talk for branding in web3

“We want our brand to look like Apple.”

How often has a new client come to an agency and said this? More times than I can count.

Of course, they really mean that they want their brand to “be” like Apple. They want trust, loyalty, and instant recognition from a simple icon. They want to be famous. And, of course, there’s the cool factor.

I can tell you with all of the certainty in my body that there is nothing any agency can do to guarantee that your re-brand will result in the next Apple. Or Nike. Or Coca-Cola. 

I can, however, drop some old advertising advice for the seemingly new frontier, web3: stop focusing your branding on tech and start focusing on people using your products.

The tech industry, especially web3, is full of oblique concepts, abstract infrastructure, and gradients—lots of gradients. What’s missing? How about transparency, plain English, personality, emotion, and soul?

What really drives brand loyalty for a consumer? Yes, you need to start with a great product. But people want to FEEL something. Ironically, as we hide behind our screens, tucked away from a world full of war, pandemic, and climate change, we’re actually social creatures that crave emotion and human interaction.

Web3 is a social technology, and its heart is users—real people. We want our brands to make us feel part of a community, appreciated, and seen. 

And who wins in an oversaturated market entirely of the same-same? Disruptors. And brands actually invested in connecting with their audience and appealing to our collective humanity and emotions. Brands brave enough to write copy with a viewpoint, genuinely invest in their communities, and use color and imagery that isn’t detached and ‘safe’ but warm and humanizing. 

My branding advice: be brave, have a heart, and think different.