If Blockchain is the answer for global brands, what is the question?

Brands struggle with this most fundamental question. Not just small or new brands, but large, public brands that have been around for a lifetime or more.

As the global village simultaneously grows closer with technologies designed to connect users and moves further apart with polarizing politics and finance, a unifying element may be figuring out why your brand matters and understanding how you can make it matter even more more. Help may be available.

Having worked with a variety of companies telling their stories across industries and geographies – to audiences, investors and internally – I’ve found that the common point of gravity for successful market positioning and global growth stories came when we identified why they mattered.

But there was a twist.

There is a common thread as we wrestled with the question. The twist? Blockchain as a growth enabler. For years, blockchain had been growing up—and many hadn’t noticed—a punchline among futurists as a unifying solution to the world’s problems.

Part of the blame can be assigned to the crypto crash. Management teams ran from blockchain, or at least didn’t run to it, because they assumed that if crypto was in bad shape, so was blockchain. But they were wrong, and the smart ones find out.

Their headline is simple: blockchain is not crypto. Far from. It is a fast-growing growth accelerator for brands.

While the crypto crash played out, the more innovative players in the blockchain space were quietly building in the background and are now poised to help brands find limitless and sustainable growth in ways that to date have not been fully explored. Sustainability, banking and product origin emerge as three areas of opportunity.

For these three alone, the answer is compelling: blockchain initiatives can remove friction from day-to-day actions and transactions and do so securely with unparalleled levels of transparency. The result is a measurable improvement in all parts of the value chain.

In other words, we can create value where there was once none. Just when brands thought they had the revenue stranglehold on their products, blockchain applications and platforms have arrived to enable new value streams using existing product sets.

An Olympic-sized example

A simple example is a recommendation to the French Olympic organizers for 2024. Ticket fraud and widespread reselling on the secondary market mean that organizers of major sporting events typically lose millions. And of course, the prevalence of counterfeit tickets puts the consumer experience at risk. This applies to most major sporting events.

But a recommendation from the French Olympic Committee requires tickets to be sold on a blockchain foundation. The result would provide an unchanging environment for sales – no manipulation and no fraudulent tickets. No matter how many times or how much these tickets were sold, the organizers would automatically get their cut. Fake tickets and scalpers would be removed from the process.

It should be clear that blockchain has grown up and can solve real-world problems. Removing friction and enabling transparent, fair processes that scale like crazy and bolt on existing technology stacks will be key to blockchain being a key element in global business expansion.

There are good examples of the use of blockchain capabilities with NFTs and the like, but they have typically been ad-hoc rather than core to the business agenda. That will change.

But to accelerate this change, blockchain needs to shed the baggage of the jargon. DAOs, dapps, nodes, tokens… the list goes on. The lingua franca of blockchain itself creates a barrier to entry. Smart people in big companies struggle to process why these words matter.

Instead of expecting the world to learn the jargon of blockchain, winning brands will turn to companies that deliver results without the jargon. The results may well be a positive consequence of using blockchain, but it is not the technological wizardry that matters. That’s the result.

And when you have the results, it becomes so much easier to answer the all-consuming question: why do we matter?

Scott McKenzie is the founder of Mischief Maker. For more on what marketers and their partners need to do to succeed on a global level, check out The Drum’s Globalization Deep Dive.