If you’re a marketer who’s pulled off collaborations with other brands - or external communities related to your brand - you know how much coordination, planning, approval, and red tape is involved in making it happen.
While collaborations are a way for one brand to onboard new customers from the community, they’re also an opportunity for those customers to get their hands on interesting new products, sometimes at a discount.
The brand that wants to collaborate works with the owners of the community to create a promotional offer. The owners of the community send that internally to their members. No customer list or other data needs to go out. Seems like a win-win. So what makes this challenging?
Oh, the gatekeepers!
The biggest hurdle here is the gatekeepers. They want something in return for being the broker in this transaction. They could derail or single-handedly kill the entire deal if they don’t get what they want, without ever asking their community.
If you do get through the broker fees, much of the negotiation is about playing along with their rules, since you’re delivering your brand’s message through someone else's. You’ll need to have regular meetings and carefully review their copy, graphics, content calendars, and all the other moving parts that could end up causing an issue. And if your collaboration is with a much bigger company, every word of your message and its delivery will be subject to their terms and conditions.
The great news is that there is a way to get around this as Web3 offers a solution!
We call it "permissionless collaboration", like the permissionless innovation that web3 enables.
When you take data like customer lists out of closed platforms, away from gatekeepers, and move it to an open protocol like the blockchain, anyone can build innovative new services on top of that shared foundation. Communities become decentralized and no single entity “owns” that community anymore. With that, you no longer need to get permission from a middle man or broker to engage with that community.
Imagine you’re a retailer about to launch some amazing monkey bread - a recipe that’s been in your family for generations - and everyone’s been raving about the samples you’ve been sharing at your pop-up stores downtown.
While you are just one month away from opening your first bricks-and-mortar store, you want to sell online and need a major marketing push. You can rely on, and spend thousands of dollars on, acquiring customers via paid advertising - where Facebook or the advertising platform gets the primary upside. Or… you could share the upside with your early customers by targeting a community directly, such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Why the Bored Apes? Well, it's monkey bread!
Since the BAYC member addresses are on-chain, you can just airdrop your loyalty program NFTs that give them 45% off their purchase, and they’ll be able to redeem these tokens at your online checkout. Save the thousands of dollars you were going to hand to a social media platform, and pass that saving directly to your first customers.
When you integrate Taco’s simple token-gating on your ecommerce store, like Shopify, you choose an NFT for the token-gate to check for before shoppers can buy that product. This makes it simple and secure to check that they hold the required tokens. You can choose an existing token, such as Bored Ape or a Nouns NFT, or you can also launch your own loyalty program token with bespoke perks and utility.
Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook and Twitter crunched all the numbers for you, using customer personas assembled from data they scraped from wherever they could. Apple put a dent in that with iOS 15’s “ask not to track”, and Google is working on the “cookie apocalypse” with de-individualized analytics. It’s a convenient service for marketers and web3 offered no such affordances… until now.
Taco makes it easy for brands to launch their permissionless collaboration within minutes. It’s as easy as picking the products to unlock, exclusive discounts you wish to offer, and a simple click to airdrop those tokens to a targeted web3 community or audience base of your choice.
All you have to do is identify your ideal web3 communities and token holders. If you’re selling sneakers, you can market to people who we know value their collectability and athleticism, the kind who are already holding Nike’s CryptoKicks NFTs.
Permissionless collaboration enables you to directly engage with a community of potential customers, in a way that was never possible on Web 2.0. You can use wallet addresses and NFTs as building blocks to create all kinds of new experiences for those new customers.
And with Taco, you can take advantage of the ownership, portability, and permissionless innovation of web3, with all the ease-of-use and rich analytics your Web 2.0 platforms offer you today.