NFTs are not just speculative digital art collectibles. They are much more than that. If you are a brand, then this article will hopefully give you some direction as to how you can use NFTs with a customer centric, value driven and community first approach. 

The hype around NFTs is real. As of 9th of May 2022, in the last seven days over 700 Million US Dollars worth of NFTs were traded on OpenSea NFT marketplace alone, mostly minted on the Ethereum and Polygon chains. And over 11.8 Billion US Dollars worth of NFTs have been traded across the top five collections globally with most of the trades happening in the last two and half years. 

You might have come across a bunch of articles using some seriously confusing keywords such as - smart contracts, minting, gas fee, ethereum, blockchain, OpenSea, decentraland, MetaMask, whitelist, rug pull and the list goes on. 

Fundamentally, NFTs are ‘non fungible tokens’ built on smart contracts on a blockchain, which help establish verifiable ownership of assets digitally. These assets could be anything from a song, a video game, video, audio, written word, art or photo. You can even create a digital smart contract to establish digital ownership for a physical asset like a house, car, club membership, hotel rental, events, flight tickets and others. 

As a brand you might be thinking where to start. On this journey of NFT exploration two words which should become your best friends are - Scarcity and Access. 

Think of how you can create scarcity (exclusivity) for your collection and what access (benefits) do you offer your collectors (customers). 

To help you, at Ekstasy we have developed a 5 layer strategy plan. Instead of getting carried away by how your creative is going to look, we strongly recommend you follow the step-by-step process to unlock your brand’s NFT project potential. 

We believe there are three main ways of unlocking value in the NFT space. 

Use Case 1:

Increase Customer Touch Points and make Customer Interactions more Fun. 

All businesses want to increase meaningful touchpoints with their customers. Especially, in the tech world all apps want to be super apps. They are all hungry for a greater share of their customer’s time. You might be an insurance company who is engaging with your customer only once, at the time of their policy renewal or when they are making a claim. Both are quite stressful scenarios for your customer. Or you might be a big bank, or even a small cafe where you already have multiple touch points with your customers on a regular basis but you might want to make these touch points more fun. 

Use Case 2: 

Increase Customer Loyalty and give birth to Super-Rewards.

Just like video game NFTs, where you unlock digital skins, armour, toys, fashion items and others as you keep playing the game, you can use that same model to develop gamifications around your customer loyalty programmes. 

Starbucks announced that they are going to launch a loyalty linked NFT programme. CMO Brady Brewer said “Imagine acquiring a new digital collectible from Starbucks, where that product also serves as your access pass to a global Starbucks community, one with engaging content experiences and collaboration all centred around coffee.”

We say, think of NFT utility and community incentives for both your customers and employees, with exclusive memberships, discounts, cross business partnerships and commercial opportunities and much more. 

An important point of any database related activity like loyalty programmes is confirmation of identity. With NFTs a customer could prove their identity and unlock different business loyalty points, instead of downloading tens of different apps. 

Using the power of Composable NFTs, that can be combined to create other NFT(s), brands can unlock super-rewards for their customers, where there are multiple mini loyalty levels they need to unlock before they get a big reward. Rewards do not always have to be commercially driven. It could be access to something exciting or something really useful to the customer. 

Use Case 3: 

Make Customers part of your Brand Growth Journey in Real-Time. 

NFTs can be programmed to react to real-world data. As a brand you hold a lot of customer data, which can be a gold mine to create dynamic triggers for helping your customers' NFTs to evolve. 

Dynamic NFTs will allow you to delight your customers more often and build a friendly relationship. 

Think of Fitbit customers unlocking badges as they exercise more. Similarly, a bank could offer badges for customers as they continue to spend with their bank card or even bank linked NFT account. 

The applications could range from weather, sports through to artists. It allows the community collecting your NFTs to feel they are part of a growing brand or someone’s career. 

In the dynamic NFT example above (called ‘golden sun’) you see LaMelo Ball in a gif. The NFT evolved from a grey scale model to a more shiny golden colour once he won NBA’s Rookie of the Year award. His fans and collectors would continue to receive perks, rewards and exclusive value unlocks as his statistics change over time and his career grows.

Everything above is just scratching the surface of the potential of the humble NFT. The value creation piece that the NFTs unlock is huge and future use cases will make it more commonplace for brands and their customers. 

We hope that you got some inspiration to explore the world of NFTs and if you feel overwhelmed, you can always contact Ekstasy on [email protected] and one of our senior consultants will be delighted to chat with you about your NFT project. 

Ekstasy is a full service creative advertising agency, which has a complete department which caters to the tech, commercial, legal and creative aspects linked to NFTs, AR, VR and other interactive technologies.

Ekstasy launched the world’s first integrated advertising campaign as NFTs over the summer of 2021 to raise approximately £32k worth of awareness for the amazing charity Magic Breakfast who are fighting food insecurity in UK schools. 

Check out the Magic Breakfast NFTs.