How the blockchain industry became bored with ‘blockchain’
What we learned from analyzing how 130 companies talk and write about their ICOs
How a market evolves is difficult to perceive in real time. You can see how one blockchain project positions itself against the backdrop of its competitors, but how can you distill the evolution an entire industry’s positioning? To answer this question, our research team zoomed out to look how blockchain marketing and positioning as a whole has been evolving amidst doubt, scrutiny, and success.
To get a macro view of content and marketing in the crypto-sphere, we analyzed 130 successful ICOs over three separate month-long snapshots (June 2017, January 2018, June 2018). These snapshots capture different points in an evolving market. The audience was shifting from enthusiasm to weariness in relation to ICOs and blockchain-based projects overall.
Here’s how we did it
First, we looked at the project description, as provided to ICO rating sites. We then took project headlines, three key benefits, and the most commonly used keywords on project websites to form a general picture of how ICOs position themselves.
Product descriptions were taken verbatim from the ICO listing site. The headline was the main message from the website, with a more marketing than descriptive focus. The benefits were distilled into the three biggest advantages for the intended consumer and finally, keywords were taken by scraping the website content for the most frequently used terms, omitting brand names and standard terms such as ‘the’.
The goal
By analyzing a large cross-section of ICOs we aimed to understand a number of issues: the general sentiment of the market, how the audience perceives different messages, and what companies consider important for the future of tokenized projects.
Phase one: June 2017
In June 2017, both the products and their marketing were mainly based on blockchain and decentralization. The most frequently cited benefits were security, transparency, and ease of use.
Despite being a feature — a foundation — rather than the focus of most projects, blockchain was undoubtedly the star. It was the most frequently used positioning tool, the most popular term in project descriptions and marketing headlines.
This suggests two things: new blockchains were being developed and projects were using the novelty and notoriety of the word to generate added excitement in their ICO marketing.
Either way, the projects being marketed were nearly all better ways to build, or better ways to exchange and trade information. They weren’t positioning themselves as projects for the general public to start using right out of the box. They were marketed for an audience of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and blockchain developers looking to create new projects with higher security and ease of use. In June 2017, blockchain was still an industry marketed for developers.
Phase two: January 2018
By January 2018, a high point in the market cap of cryptocurrencies, the marketing language had shifted to accommodate the rise of public interest in cryptocurrencies as appreciating assets.
Platform had emerged as the most popular project description term, and blockchain still featured heavily across all of the marketing language.
In the intervening 6 months, the wave of investment in ICOs and crypto tokens meant that managing and trading tokens had become a real, organic use-case for blockchain technology. The natural security and transparency of the platform were perfectly suited to manage valuable assets. This is the first widespread example of a user-focused marketing, with a single targeted use-case rising through the noise of ICO marketing.
The use of cryptocurrency in project descriptions, crypto in marketing headlines, and token as a keyword all attest to this latest trend. The rise of crypto and cryptocurrency as core marketing positions can also be understood as ICO projects attempting to gain momentum based on the weight of news and hysteria the global bull run in the world of crypto was carrying with it.
Phase three: June 2018
By June 2018, the overall market had corrected severely and the bears had firmly taken over from the bulls.
Blockchain had moved from a cornerstone of project positioning to the leading keyword. It had moved from the language of marketing to the longer technical descriptions, suggesting that the technical specifics of blockchain projects were being used to add depth to the content, rather than using a buzzword to generate interest in a project.
By this point in the industry, and the relative calming of the frenzy that an extended bear market brings with it, the language of ICO marketing was working harder to target business use-cases and implementations. The most frequently cited benefits being listed were universality, scalability, and, profitability.
The number of transactions/transfers that can be sent/executed directly relates to business use-cases and the viability of use. A key argument about harnessing blockchain has been that once it starts to be used by numerous people/institutions is that it quickly reaches a tipping point of unsustainability. The shift towards scalability as a core benefit is addressing this and presents a marketing message that blockchain technology is no longer just an innovation, but fit for use.
The use of profitable as a key benefit also demonstrates the move towards appealing to product users as well as investors in the ICO. Revenue can be generated through the use of the platform rather than just holding the token as an appreciating asset, representing a maturation of the market and a direct response to the price correction of major coins.
The overall shift in language observed across these three snapshots of the ICO market can be explained by a deeper public understanding of the limitations and benefits of the blockchain. The initial interest has centered around projects that form the infrastructure that will form the foundation of a new crypto marketplace of Dapps and products but hasn’t managed to quite generate a mainstream acceptance that matches the purported potential of blockchain projects.
The marketing tone is now moving towards product-led projects with a more targeted audience and specific use-cases, using blockchain-based technology to form the feature descriptions that make the final user benefits possible. It represents an industry still finding the right voice to position new ICOs as viable, profitable, and more effective than current iterations, rather than just relying on the innovation and hype of the blockchain and the reports of returns from their token sales.
How do you think the positioning of blockchain-based projects will develop in the coming year? Let us know in the comments below!
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