“Bitcoin will do to banks what Email did to the postal industry”said Rick Falkvinge, IT Entrepreneur and Founder, Swedish Pirate Party.While bitcoin has faced many a bumps on the road to be the money of the internet, the technology that propelled it has certainly found a lot of aficionados. That technology is Blockchain.
Simply put, Blockchain = Network to transfer value without intermediaries
A little hard to get? Imagine a validated letter without the postal stamp i.e. email. The post department never stamped it, but an email is still your valid proof with sent/received copies stored in a server.
Blockchain unfolds in 2016:
More than $ 1 billion is estimated to be spent to bring blockchain technology.It is being extensively experimented across industries starting from banks to supply chain.Eg, the NASDAQ & Chain partnership to transform private share trading has been a key milestone.
The marketing link to the Blockchain:
So why should a marketeer be worried about a technology called blockchain.The reasons are many.To start off it is a foundational technology like the TCP/IP. While it may take time to evolve, it will transform the very foundations of doing business.To understand the marketing angle, let us list the key features of blockchain.It is :
-Auditable & Traceable
-Counterfiet resilient
-Irreversible
-Auto-verified
For a moment, now apply these to customer data analytics and real-time authenticated responses to changes in customer behaviour. This is the link between data-driven marketing and blockchain.
Power to the consumers-
Every large marketer and marketing service company would like a massive identity graph of all consumers, with the ability to leverage that information in all communications with their customers. But consumers (and regulators) aren’t likely to let such databases be created, let alone exploited, if they can stop it.
Enter the Blockchain. Combining Blockchain technology with multikey encryption could give us a well-distributed, user-controlled identity graph that could monumentally empower consumer in the ad and marketing world -- from centralized media and marketing companies to end consumers which is a culmination of the trend we are already seeing.
Marketers can expect to use intelligent technology in the coming years – not only in monetary value but reputations, social interactions, experiences and memories, relevancy to tastes and ambitions.
For example,in the FMCG world, the blockchain might see consumers buy their household products direct from P&G or Unilever rather than through a supermarket. Sidestepping the middle man would reduce the cost to consumers considerably.
Supermarkets might react by providing new and innovative Artificial Intelligence services to customers.
These services, utilising personal data from the blockchain, could include managing health goals with a service linked to health data collected from a smartwatch. In fact consumers will gravitate towards brands that provide most value to them and will quickly reject those that don’t satisfy their needs.
Honest Marketing:
At Shanghai Fashion Week in October, fashion label Babyghost worked with VeChain, a blockchain platform, to let customers “verify” a selection of handbags. Customers here could scan the tags using their phones to find a “story” of the product — where it’s from, who previously modeled it, and so on.
The idea here is that blockchain can be used to advertise a product in a much more “authentic” way that doesn’t come off as marketing.
Marketing in an IoT world:
The near future will be cashless and wireless, with the internet of things. We would all be wearing chip-based devices to order everything.And to speak to these devices, intelligent laser precise inbound-marketing will be the accepted norm of the day.