Pause for a moment in your day and go on this guided meditation.
See yourself at the train station waiting on the platform. You feel rather than hear a distant rumbling, then a whistle echoing through the summer air. Finally you see a spectacular, gleaming bullet train come into view, out of the early morning fog. The fantastic and marvelous train’s final destination is not posted, but as it slows it beckons you. Aboard! All Aboard! The blinds on the windows of the passenger cars are closed. Who is there? Where are they headed?. An express train roars by on another track speeding onward at a dizzying velocity. You hear the call again. All Aboard! Do you get on?
That is the situation many companies and brands find themselves vis a vis Web3, the emerging new technologies promising a step-change in business’s strategic development along with power, potential and profit cut with a bracing dose of peril. The Web3 engine chugs along the track to the steady cadence of a recognizable refrain: Met-a-verse, gen-er-a-tive AI, N-F-T, block-chain, VR, IRL, AR over and over again. Yes, it beckons, but do you get on or wait for the next one? There will be a next one, right?
What are the pain points in your business? The ones you – and your colleagues – have worked hard to solve IRL (in real life) for years and haven’t found the key.
Coming out of the meditative reverie, we first discard the notion of getting on a train without knowing where it takes us. That’s the path of the wanderer, the hitchhiker in the Web3 galaxy. At Kate Newlin Consulting we work with significant brands and entrepreneurial start-ups alike. We start by asking – like any good physician – where does it hurt?
That may seem too facile, but for us it provides the unlock: What are the pain points in your business? The ones you – and your colleagues – have worked hard to solve IRL (in real life) for years and haven’t found the key. You know the ones. We have identified five serious, even persistent categories of business challenges which Web3 tactics are best poised to address. If one of those describes your situation, then it is time to study the route map in detail. A golden ticket awaits.
Mission Clarity is the prime direction of Web3 business strategy development. Here are the five issues it’s fair to consider for serious study and planning:
- Brand Marketing. There are remarkably diverse opportunities here: Do you want to reach out to a younger audience? Bingo. If Gucci can do it, so can your brand. Perhaps you have a core of loyal brand enthusiasts, even evangelists. Here’s a good place to forge them into a consumer community to help co-create new iterations. Looking for brand loyalty? Take a look at Starbucks’ Odyssey program, an NFT by another name.
- Revenue Generation. Beyond NFTs – but including them for sure – the opportunity here is revenue and CAGR accretive. The sale of status clothing and accessories for avatars is emerging as a self-perpetuating pot of gold at the end of the imaginary rainbow in various Metaverse locales.
- Recruitment and Training. Imagine the 15-year-old endlessly engaged in Wendyverse and super Wendy as she works to destroy meat freezers in the game. When it comes time to apply for an afterschool job, what QSR can we imagine looms larger in the gamers IRL worldview? And, how better to train those newbie employees than by gamifying their tasks?
- Operational Efficiency. Having issues with returns? Want to provide assurance to your clients they are actually getting your brand and not a counterfeit? Need a mechanism to prove to the environmentally conscious the sources of your ingredients? Web3 is the place to turn.
- Footprint Expansion. If you believe there’s a market for your wares, even a demand for it beyond your current sales geography, this is a great place to test that theory: Web3 tools do not honor the same map and borders as IRL. This is a great way to whet the appetite of new customers and prove to yourself and potential franchisees, for example, there’s already brand awareness and affection building.
This train’s ‘destination’ isn’t going to be a geographic one. It is a strategic one. Figure out the issues which dog you today and have perhaps perpetually, the ones that keep you up and night. Then, get on the train going there, the ones marked Brand Marketing or Recruitment and Training or Operational Efficiency. You get it. Know where you want to be at the end of your Web3 exploration, then you’re ready to start.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, right. We know this. Imagine your first step is onto the train marked Brand Marketing. Knowing the destination is, yes, mission critical. It is essential but not sufficient. This is going to be a working ride. We begin by auditing the environment: Brands and businesses which are comparable, if not directly competitive, are already innovating in Web3 spaces, the Roblox, Decentralands and beyond into Meta Horizon. What is Nike doing? Vans? Claire’s. Sally Beauty? Beyond the catastrophizing headlines and the cheerleading hype, there’s a ‘when not if’ reality to the full development of Web3. We find where our Clients best fit in that landscape.
Next, we have a roster of roughly 2500 wicked smart colleagues – we call them our Agent Provocateurs – and roughly 350 of them are leaders in the various bright and shiny panels of the Web3 disco ball. We interview them one-on-one and in community ideation sessions to determine their ‘trained brain’ view of best in class initiatives, what’s coming and the white space available.
We use the same type of interviews with our Client’s stakeholders to identify one of the most powerful factors in successful Web3 (or any) corporate initiative: Organizational will. We don’t have to linger here too long in a discussion of how great ideas are dumbed down to oblivion by the political crossfires of corporate hierarchy. Suffice it to say, we ask early on to meet with all those who can build or kill innovative thinking. These ideations identify and build fresh thinking in light of IRL realities, as well as bullet-proof recommendations against friendly fire later.
Finally, we develop the SGOAs for success: Strategic Growth Opportunity Areas. We don’t stop with the PowerPoint presentation, we identify the best-in-class partners to bring the vision(s) to life, including costs, timing and KPIS, which are in the water supply of Web3 activities, straightforward to track on a shared dashboard, allowing for rapid response to underperformance.
The Web3 journey is not for the faint of heart. We tell prospective clients we look to climb on board with those willing to pioneer a new world, one we believe augers a once in a career transformation of the global marketspace. There are those whose who jump on without knowing where it’s headed. We’ve read about their crash and burn efforts in the business press. The mantra of ‘fail fast, fix or forget’ is a revisionist take on what these companies stumbled over in their rush gain first mover advantage.
The Clients we work with know what they need, know the issue which requires such focus, and they are ready, willing and able, when the train to that destination arrives at the station. Unfortunately for others, think of them as our 21st century version of Anna Karenina, to step in front of the train does not end well.
Kate Newlin is founder of Kate Newlin Consulting (www.katenewlin.com). She’s a renowned business and brand strategist with a keen sense of what the future might look like.
