Core Team Up Close and Personal — Dirk Eschenbacher
Dear Atlas Community,
Now that you have had the chance to meet the CEO of Atlas Zan Wu, we now present you with the second entry in our “Core Team Up Close and Personal” series. The person getting interviewed this time is none other than Atlas’ CMO Dirk Eschenbacher. We hope that you enjoy it!
Hello Dirk, thank you for sitting down with us today, could you introduce yourself to our community? Tell us who Dirk Eschenbacher is and how did he get to China?
Hey there, my name is Dirk, I am the marketing and branding and design guy behind Atlas and Zanadu. I am originally from Munich, in Germany, but have lived and worked in Asia for the past 20 years.
The bigger part of this time I spent working with the world’s top advertising agencies coming up with big brand ideas for big brands like Apple, Audi, Volkswagen, IBM, Lenovo, DHL, Motorola, China Mobile, WWF, UNICEF, Unilever and many others. During that time I was fortunate to win many global and Asian creative awards and met many smart and influential people in the world of creativity and brand building. This time taught me the importance of big, disruptive ideas that get attention and deliver value within a business context. To be fun and loud and relevant and deliver serious results.
My other passion is travel. I have traveled to more than 60 countries on this planet and love any kind of trip, from luxury pamper hotel stays at nice beaches to backpack trekking through the Himalayas and riding horses in Mongolia. I moved to Thailand when I was 25 years old and founded a travel startup. Unfortunately, it was too early and we got caught in the Dot-com bust. 12 years later I co-founded Zanadu and now I am finally able to combine my passion for travel and my passion for building cool brands.
During your trips you’ve probably made a lot of friends that know you well. However, what’s the one thing most people don’t actually know about you?
I cook some mean and spicy Thai Food.
A Marketing Genius and a Chef! So, how does blockchain fit into the story? When and how did you find out about blockchain technology?
I found out about Blockchain technology in 2015. However, at the time I was too busy getting really deeply involved with virtual reality, so I postponed my dive into blockchain until 2017.
I have always been an early adopter of new technologies and am easily excited about new breakthrough concepts. My interested in blockchain technology started back in 2015. However, at the time I was too busy getting really deeply involved with virtual reality, so I postponed my dive into blockchain until 2017. (When Virtual Reality came onto my radar, I assembled a team and produced our first travel VR content piece in 2015. It was called “The Dream” and went on to win the top prize at the HTC Global Content Competition. In total we have produced over 30 pieces in the short span of two years.)
It took until 2017 for me to really take the time to fully understand the potential of blockchain. When I eventually sat down with my Zanadu partners to discuss the pros and cons and use-cases of blockchain it lasted many, many long days and nights. It became clear to all of us that we want to be part of this early batch of pioneers that create useful and potentially game changing applications on the new technology.
That is an amazing achievement by the team. How did you actually end up starting Zanadu?
All four of us are passionate about travel. We also share the same passion for technology, brand building and creating value through a business model. That is why we built Zanadu.
We have managed to build Zanadu into a profitable business that delivers value to a large amount of travelers on a daily basis. Along the way, we built the leading high-end travel brand in China with a community consisting of a few million young and affluent and in my opinion, pretty cool customers, who trust the brand and the products.
How do you see Atlas in relation to Zanadu?
We want to build on the success of Zanadu. We want to bring more value to our community, and also expand the community to include not only luxury travelers in the Chinese market, but to deliver value to all travelers on a global scale.
China is the largest travel market in the world, and because we created Zanadu, we have the attention of many influential global travel brands. That in turn enables us to really understand the industry, and discover what works and what doesn’t work. And from that deep understanding comes the idea of Atlas.
The idea and vision for Atlas is to connect all travelers and suppliers in the travel industry to a decentralized market place, where we can get value from authentic and relevant travel recommendations, where quality content creation is incentivized, where safe transactions are facilitated and data can be shared based on consent.
Judging from your experience as a marketeer, do you feel that marketing in the blockchain/cryptocurrency sphere differs from traditional marketing and if so, in what way?
That is a good question. I observed the blockchain “industry” over the past 3 years and at least in the ICO years it seemed that everyone followed the same sort of “communication” and “branding” pattern. Everything looked very tech and futuristic and — looked the same.
Many company names sound very “star-trekkie” (including ours actually). Most ICO websites were designed on the same content grid. Everyone goes “we need to be tech style”, “future style”, lets not stray away from the style, otherwise investors may lose their confidence. I think uncertainty in the market as well as inexperience about branding drove this flood of same-looking websites, names and promises.
If you come from brand building and marketing, you know that this cant be good. If everyone looks and sounds the same, then only the one who doesnt look and sound the same will get all the attention. The old rule goes: when everyone zigs, then zag. I think it wont take long and marketing in the crypto and blockchain space will come back to the fundamentals questions:
- What is our product
- What benefit or true value does it deliver?
- What are we standing for as a team or company or brand?
- How can we play a meaningful role in the lives of people?
Marketing is about finding that value and making it relevant to real people. In 2019 it will still be real humans who have to read through boring whitepapers and find their way through complex but superficial websites. So let’s make this s**t more human.
As a founder of both Zanadu and Atlas, life can probably become quite hectic and stressful. What are some of the ways that you deal with this stress?
There is a lot going on here but we are not doing this for the first time. Setting priorities, having clear role definitions and being proactive communicators helps us to move this baby forward.
If it gets too hectic, I find balance in three things: Meditation lets me detach myself from the daily grind and elevate myself to the bigger picture. Cooking, which is a form of meditation for me, helps me to literally deliver value to my friends and family, and going out to motocross allows me to bury that stress in the dust and to feel the air of freedom and possibility blowing on my face.
Last question: Now that we know that travelling is one of your biggest passions, can you tell us what travel experience in your personal life has been the most defining?
When I was 8 years old I visited Machu Picchu. At that time tourism in South America wasn't a huge thing yet. We sat in the train from Cusco to Machu Picchu, passing through the sacred Urubamba valley. We were the only foreigners in the carriage, travelling with local Indio women and their kids on their way back to their villages. As the train climbed up through the valley, the local travellers started to sing their Peruvian songs for us and shared their food with us. It was a wonderful experience that made me feel very welcome even though I was ten thousand kilometres away from home.
It is a beautiful lifelong memory, and I think that’s what travel is all about.
We hope you've enjoyed the second entry in our “Core Team Up Close and Personal” series with the Atlas Network Core Team. If there are questions you’d like to ask our team members, drop by our Telegram channel and let us know!
