The Importance of Brand in Web3 Digital Marketing

Branding was born to help consumers navigate the paradox of choice, but the technological development of Web3 continues to confound even the savviest marketers. Despite decentralisation promising a fragmented market, Goblintown and Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) have risen through the ranks. As projects flood the world of Web3, those that stand out have a Web3 digital marketing strategy that draws from a solid brand identity and a keen eye for flows of contemporary culture. 

 Despite the tension between Web2 and Web3, an ideal future combines the best of both these worlds. Web2 championed accessibility and user experience, developing a centralised system for networking, knowledge sharing and interpersonal communication. Experts in Web3 digital marketing take these elements and build strong, tight-knit communities that emphasise human characteristics. You cannot launch a successful Web3 project without gaining and maintaining people’s trust. 

 We need to move away from the idea that the technological developments of Web3 are inspiring a cultural revolution, but rather the other way around. This new web symbolises a “massive societal shift, infused with innovation and supercharged with values,” states blockchain venture capital founder Lior Messika. But this situation isn’t new. As brands augmented symbols to represent specific intangible values, we stopped buying products and started buying what the product said about our personality.  

 This curation of brands into fully formed identities has gone to an extreme. Substack writer, Rayne Fisher-Quann, spoke to this in her article ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Complex Female Characters’, wherein this identification turned away from personality and toward mental illness. “It’s very common for people online to express their identities through an artfully curated list of things they consume or inspire to consume,” she explains.

Personal curation through brands has permeated how we understand the world and how we relate to each other. Since neoliberalism valorised the individual, as a society, we’ve become acutely aware of personal narratives and can scrutinise them in much detail. Relating to the world has become an “if you know, you know” (iykyk) type of exchange because those who don’t know these cultural references become ostracised from the conversation.  

 In this way, by aligning ourselves with brands, we inadvertently force others to do their research if they want to keep up with contemporary culture. We become walking brand identifiers that provide an infinite combination of intangible values for new personalities to be formed. We’ve become “gimmicky”, as aesthetic theorist Sianne Ngai would say, because we’re aware of how capitalism constantly misprises things bought and sold. This sentiment has fuelled mistrust in the world of Web3, but ironically, it also opens a pathway toward a trust-filled future. 

 As Ngai explains, “cheap gimmicks are enjoyable if they’re presented with a certain flamboyancy, a good gimmick can assume as much as it confounds, and a bad gimmick can be ‘comically irritating’ if it’s managed to convince others despite its obvious overcompensation”. Web3 is a good gimmick, for contemporary cultures’ penchant for irony and the absurd sits at the core of its make-up. It’s the mismatched bagging of Web3’s hustle mentality with Goblin Mode’s resignation that has drawn so many into Goblintown’s interpretation of the world. 

 As self-proclaimed “lit-bros”, the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) told New Yorker Magazine that they first bonded over an argument about David Foster-Wallace, American author and father of post-ironic literature. This admission is telling. Their conversation informs the hyperawareness toward brand identities that Rayne Fisher-Quann discussed and Ngai’s good gimmick. For if a brand, in the words of trend forecaster Sean Monahan, is “a prank when you trick your friend, a scam when you trick your audience, and a hoax when you trick the world, what do we call it when everyone is already in on the joke?”.