Was “Catblox X Puma Capsule” campagin a successful first step of Puma’s invasion to Web 3.0?
I discussed Nike’s digital marketing strategies in my last blog article. I hope those words give you a rough understanding of Nike’s current marketing efforts in NFT and virtual reality.
To be honest, among all the sneaker brands, Nike is the most successful one in terms of digital marketing. This success can be attributed not only to the popularity of the brand itself but also because Nike seamlessly integrates with digital marketing strategies. However, in this blog, we will focus on a less influential brand in the digital marketing space compared to Nike, but one that represents a steady approach to enter the digital market. The brand we’re going to talk about, which entered the digital market last year, is Puma.
Unlike Nike, which has been building itself as a fashionable and trendy brand since the last century, Puma has made less effort to catch up with pop culture. Limited collaborations with gaming, luxury brands, and other pop culture icons, as well as limited sports sponsorships in the United States, have led Puma to fall behind in the sneaker market, particularly in terms of pop culture appeal.
I believe this is the reason why Puma decided to make such a bold move into Web 3.0 last year with a harsh pose in order to catch up with other sneaker brands. Within only four months, they registered with Ethereum, integrated the concept of the Metaverse, and launched first set of NFTs. This series of swift action all signifying Puma is eager to become a player of Metaverse and establish customer group in virtual term as much as possible, and also bring some social influence to the brand to create certain level of buzz.
The first campagin Puma conducted within Web 3.0 is the launch of “Catblox X Puma Capsule” in Jun. 6, 2022.
In this campaign, Puma provided 2,500 NFT products to the market and ranked them into five tiers according to their rarity: Normal (with three levels of rarity), Rare, and Super Rare. Unlike traditional NFTs, which only provide a digital blockchain code to the buyer, the Catblox X Puma Capsule campaign bundled the NFT with a corresponding PHYSICAL ITEM, such as a T-shirt, when customers purchased the NFT item online.
Readers can recognize the discreet attitude of Puma’s Metaverse strategies from the behavior of bundling both virtual and physical products. This approach allows customers who are less involved in trendy topics and still considering the validity of Metaverse to have less emotional burden when purchasing the Catblox item. In other words, Puma has executed this campaign with a well-built consideration, catering to both traditional customers and new digital customers.
The short-term result of this campaign seems to be successful when looking at the data: All 2,500 NFTs were sold out within a short period, and about 60% of the owners are keeping the NFT product instead of selling it accroding to the graph below. Nevertheless, the behavior of not selling a NFTs can be interpreted as more than mere brand loyalty or future appreciation. In fact, according to the latest price information, the Catblox NFTs have declined in value by more than a hundred times compared to the initial stock price. Therefore, I would say that while in the short term, this campaign was able to create some brand buzz, it hasn’t truly positioned Puma as a new Metaverse player in the long term and might has hurted its most loyal customer’s wallet in terms of NFT depreciation.
Within this whole expansion towards the virtual world, Catblox X Puma was merely the very first step. The reason I say this is that most of Puma’s following campaigns were oriented towards people who purchased the Catblox NFT. For example, one could be invited into the Puma virtual community only if they own the Catblox blockchain code. This concept was built with good intentions, but the limited value brought to the NFT owners in the first step has significantly impacted the success of this campaign, and the limited participation of NFT owners has diminished the vibrancy of this supposedly active community.
Overall, I believe Puma is still struggling with its expansion into the Metaverse, and there should be more efforts to conduct outside the virtual world than just bundling a T-shirt. The Metaverse is, in my opinion, a very new idea that is mostly praised by the young and trendy audience group. Therefore, not until the Metaverse reaches a level where people from various groups are glad to embrace it, Puma will find it challenging to attain a substantial customer group in the virtual world, especially if little effort is paid on building a fashion and trendy brand in the real world.
