Beyond the hype: NFTs can lead the way in transforming business experiences

Many businesses and big brands have already jumped on the nonfungible token (NFT) bandwagon, including Nike, the National Basketball Association, Pepsi and even Taco Bell. But are these just for the show, or are these NFTs creating value? Much like digital services have become essential for every business in and outside of the technology sector, I believe that tokens — and, specifically, NFTs — are likely to become equally crucial in the emerging Web3 economy for at least two reasons.

First, my view is that NFTs tokenize ideas at the atomistic level, creating rivalry and exclusivity around goods or services. Markets cannot form when goods and services are non-rival — when one person’s consumption does not trade off with another’s — or when they are non-excludable — when it is prohibitively expensive to gate access to a good or service with a price mechanism. NFTs, on the other hand, create rivalry and exclusivity by leveraging smart contracts on the blockchain that deliver NFTs to peoples’ digital wallets when they make a purchase.

Second, I also believe that organizations can use NFTs to efficiently attract and engage different tiers of customers each in their own unique way. Whereas traditional marketing involves selling goods and services at a discount, perhaps for a limited duration of time, NFTs allow brands to target specific customers and reward those who want to engage. For instance, perhaps a fashion brand decides to airdrop discount codes or special offerings that are not available anywhere else to NFT holders. Normally, that would be prohibitively expensive to do at scale, but NFTs provide a way.

Building community

To date, however, most of the NFT applications have been among bigger brands — or at least, so it seems based on media coverage. But either way, smaller organizations and even independent business owners will benefit from NFTs in the years ahead if they invest the time and energy to understand how they work. In fact, just think about the types of businesses that are most likely to benefit from NFTs: It is precisely the smaller organizations that do not have as much of a marketing budget to implement large-scale campaigns and discounts that benefit from the reduction in cost that NFTs provide to target consumers and invite them into a community.

Forget thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars that go toward buying email lists, creating sales funnels, and conducting surveys and market research. Understanding competition and knowing your consumer is always going to be important, but the landscape is fundamentally different when you think about reaching people on a blockchain based on their opting in and the ability to track what people are actually buying and engaging with in a transparent way.

That’s not to say marketing doesn’t matter. Marketing and visibility do matter insofar as consumers need to learn about the goods and services that are being offered. But the mechanism behind it all is changing — simply having a big budget is not going to have as much bang as a smaller organization or independent business owner who has a clear community of loyal customers. NFTs are simply a new technological mechanism for conveying rival and exclusive goods and services to people who value them — they are not a substitute for creating valuable goods and services in the first place.

Take, for instance, the positive effects of airdrops and governance tokens, which I’ve covered in Cointelegraph Magazine before, citing Gary Vaynerchuk and 3LAU. When used with intentionality and prudence, airdrops are a great way of rewarding early users and building a close community. Then, as momentum builds, the community grows and enters into a new phase.