#DappCon22: Day 2 - Branding in web3, Lea Filipowicz

Transcript

thanks uh first thanks everyone for coming today so my name is Leah I've been working in brand and product in web 3 since 2018 and I'm here to talk today about brands and how they exist in web3 and how we can create brands that not only speak to but also engage with the web3 community so for the story before I worked in crypto I was working in design agencies and I was a little bit shocked and disappointed by what I was seeing when I arrived in 2018 I didn't put anything here because I didn't wanted to offend anyone but for the ones who were here in

these dark times you know what I mean and I thought I could and I thought I had to make a change but crypto changed me or more precisely it changed the way I understand and perceive Brands as a role let's start with whole Brands actually begin from the very beginning so the word brand itself comes from the old Norse and it is a symbol that was burned onto animals in a cattle so you would know to which farmer it would belong to but there are symbols of ownership that are a lot older than that

like the ones you see here that were used by Masons and Potters engraved on their production so they would get paid for what they do and would also serve as a little advertising I would also argue that political and religious symbols through history are really good example of brandings there's a lot of meaning behind the colors and the symbols that are used and that were used also pretty much everywhere just like logos brands are used today on clothes on buildings on objects Etc but we have to wait until the late 19th century for things to become a little bit more official with trademarks and it

happened because of Industrial Revolution there was a mass production there was a lot more competition and companies wanted to protect their production and that's where trademark appeared and maybe I'm in front of it but if you're in Berlin you probably know that once actually the oldest trademark that has been registered for Pilsner beer it hasn't changed so much since after that in the 20s we have the radio era we're advertising through radio becomes a lot more important we see targeted messaging we see catchphrases we see Jingles doesn't mean that all the touch points didn't exist as you can see here like there was advertising

in journals they were still packaging but radio was really the first time that you could diffuse a message to a very broad audience very fast also in the 40 in the 50s with the TVs lots of things change for the brands became a lot more emotional and companies started taking a little bit more seriously and developed the concepts of brand management which is what marketing is today basically it's only in the 80s that we started seeing brand that or identities or that Embrace existing identities and it leads to a certain form of brand-led

consumerism where people would buy a product not for institute value and a whole well is don't know anything but for the brand that is behind uh good examples of these brands in the 80s and 90s would be Vans for skaters um Doc Martens for workers are also the Supreme for urban culture and it worked very well because today it's still the case it's still associated with the subcultures and people still wear them so a definition I really like found online from Brian lischer going to read

today is a brand is a wire Product Company or individual is perceived by Zeus who experience it much more than just a name or a logo a brand is the recognizable fillings these assets evoke and that's the first thing I usually tell my clients when we work together when they think brand I think logos like no the logo is part of an ecosystem and they're a lot more to it so now what change let's talk a little bit more about web3 I probably familiar already with the differences between web 1 web 2 and web 3.

but let's go through it together it's not only about interaction it's about owning something that you have received or you have created yourself it's about different touch points ways to engage with the community such as live stream which makes the World experience a lot more immersive it's about a web that is not only passive but it's about a web that is active that is run by algorithm automated and semantic and data spaces a door interconnected next no matter if you're in a web one in web 2 in web 3 or in the 19th century if

you want to present your brand you have to use different broad markers to identify it and communicate it the visual ones or logo fonts colors visuals visuals can be our logos can be pictures can be videos and we have the content one name catchphrases on The Voice nothing new this could already be trademarked in the 19th century but the new thing is the experience brand experiences existed before in a much more physical way that were very expensive very difficult to organize usually in form of an exhibition sport event a conference having worked for

Defcon this year and the last Edition can confirm it's a lot of work it's actually a lot easier to push an app or a website than doing something more physical and how can the ux be a brand marker it can be simple it can be complex it can be fast can be rich and the UI itself is not only a brand marker but it's also englobing everything you have here so everything that is Visual and content to create UI components that together will form the interface according to a design system and the other brand markers are also expressed through touch points

so here you can see the divided between ownable non-ownable interactional non-interrectional honorable here means that it's something that you have full control over you can burn it you can sell it you can stake it you can do anything you want over it no one can say anything about it no one can take it away from you the non-ownable ones can still be owned in a certain way that you can identify with it but it's not really yours in that way and if you want to engage with your community ideally you create run touch points and focus on one touch points that are rather ownable and interactional it's just much more

engaging so now let's talk about the community and who is the web free community it's a lot of people it's followers it's users is Builders literally everyone who is around the project can also be Dell members in case of Adele and why we're talking about it today is because they're really important in a brand they were already important in the past but it was more of a discussion between the brand as a separate entity and the community now because we have new channels of communication because we have new

governance systems Community became really parts of the brand itself it affects its reputation it shares information from me appropriates the code so it's not something we can really neglect even if we don't think about it it's there anyway and so we talked about who the people are but it's actually very difficult to know who they really are the way we would with traditional Medias we don't have a lot of information about people and pretty much everybody in the space is trying to protect their data so it's not like we can create a typical marketing Persona and saying oh it's um Anna she lives in France she's 26 years old she likes to

go to the markets on Sunday and that's what she bought last week but we can still find what the people like through their social media and we also see that all the traditional distinctions like political National sociological are not as important as principles that bind people together and all these identities are extended to a network and they exist and shifted into a section of different identities it means that we don't work so much with monocultures as we used to be you can if I give a concrete example you can be an ml kid on

Tick Tock and put some rap music over your video as an old demo kids if I was listening to run with my friends I would be pushed away by the community but now people are embracing that I think that's something important to consider when we're thinking about the community is now and the third point is we generate data that is used by algorithm to form these cultures and then influences in return so what can we do if typical personas are dated monocultures or disappearing or something we can not do is to serve on Trends and focus on technical limitations because both of them are

short-lived but we can create cultures instead we can create a brand that points at the larger goal something that is common to anyone to engage communities on the long term and again I have some examples that worked very well study not in web 3 because it's been not long enough to really talk about long-term success but we can think about Apple for example they don't sell only computers but they also the rather sell a future self that is creative and free we can think about so I got my notes on my wrist

I got that from the video um yeah we can think also about the reddits more like web 2 example they don't only sell a chat but they sell the possibility to find and Bing parts of um one or more communities at once and all these Brands still exists now so it's a proof that actually works so now let's talk about what's actually works also between communities and Brands there is one kind of superpower we can use and that's the memes memes are a pretty good way to create and engage communities and also give them the codes to

communicate all that by themselves and identify with it and that's the last quote of this presentation thanks Holly memes on the internet took what is already naturally occurring in the way that we communicate and stupid Shard it by making it Global and simple that pretty much um All About memes really and to close the circle how can we make a meme about the brands and that's where we can use the brand markers here you can see you have symbols you have colors you have the name also the face of the company is very important if you don't have any of these brand

markers or identifiers people will just not know what you're talking about if you're creating a brand you can also think about all the different brand markers and try to make it so that they're easily identifiable and ownable by the community a little bit meta but sometimes the meme becomes a brand itself here you can see example of the Dodge coins or the Easter rock this O2 project that worked very well usually short-lived again because there's no bigger picture it's hard to scale when it's about one specific Trend or idea so takeaways how can we build strong elastic Brands and web free first make room for change no one is

going to wait for you if you don't anyway think global um think about really anyone you can think of sometimes you just don't think about people and they become your strongest community and your strongest Ally important also to be accessible in that way engage with your community you can give them a role and a purpose Building Systems and by that I don't only mean design system with brand markers and touch points like we talked about before but also communication systems governance systems and see how they all interact together and can scale and more importantly than anything I

talked about before actually stay genuine it's really important to not overthink something because in the end people will notice it and that's it for today thanks for coming to my talk I believe we have some questions there I don't know where I'm starting for myself thank you Leia and if we have any questions this is a great time um is there a brand in the web free space that you like I mean in terms of pure branding what's how it is being

developed and stuff is difficult because the brand in web 3 I mean if we're talking about web threads in crypto or very targeted towards Builders and developers at the moment we build brands for people like us and there's a little bit of a dichotomy here because if you go to the website everybody says we're bridging web 2 and web 3 but we're still talking to people in web 3. visually so there is a lot of beautiful projects out there and I was complaining about the states of the space in 2018 but just coming to the conference today I think visually we're really coming somewhere hi so you mentioned the overlap between

Tech and culture and Community uh it almost seems like a natural extension of that would be open source branding because in web 3 the community is uh the propagator of the means and oftentimes evolve the brand do you have any good case studies or examples that we could refer to for how that open source branding model can be seated and then scale I think Bitcoin is actually a good example I remember someone developed the concept of headless brands but it can be open source but we still need to give direction and a little push

first then the symbol the colors and everything around it can evolve but we still need to gather around One initial Banner in the end but I think it is becoming open source even if companies don't want it because people reappropriate the codes no matter what got got you do uh have you seen examples that are not Bitcoin like more kind of like web3 Dow type communities that have done this successfully um I tried to work on some projects to create a framework for that to happen we didn't manage so far I have hope still okay gotcha gotcha thank you has your process changed from you know

transitioning from web 2 to web 3 in terms of involving communities uh beforehand or before you build a brand or you know having votes for stuff like that usually it's kind of a hierarchical way of working and working with the community can be I think different than yes definitely and you said votes and it's probably the things that change the most the way I work being in web free with the open minds to different ways of voting and governance and I try to use different tools so it's also different ways of voting um even I haven't tried quadratic voting so far but no one understood it and

didn't understand it either so it didn't work out but yes definitely in that way so my question uh what if there is a brand that really wants to talk to a non-web tree users and you know share the web tree culture and elements have you seen good examples of how do you uh yeah use the right dosage of web3 for non-web tree communities that's a very good question I think it depends also what the product is about like if you're trying to do something about trading then you will Embrace traditional code you can be a little bit

more techy you can be a little bit more intense if you want to create a wallet for example and you want people to open a wallet not only for themselves but also for their children to save some money for them in the future or something then you will have something that is very friendly so I think there's a few Brands out there that are already coming there just I was walking by I think it was Solana today and seeing like the the really nice cartoony 3D I think that's the kind of stuff that speaks to a very broad audience visually yeah yeah uh thank you for your speech and this thought-provoking information my

question is you mentioned several ways to build a strong web 3 brand but can you uh Define maybe one like without this thing you would not definitely build a strong brand in web3 like something that no one should do no no the most important thing uh the most important thing um it's a little bit cheesy but I think doing it with your heart and really feeling it is important and then it's also consistency and that's something that is missing a lot in the in the space to be consistent across all types of media when someone is doing a talk when you're pressing for a video when

you're doing an nft sometimes this feels that there is like different companies at once and it would send a stronger message if everything was aligned and aligned towards the same idea foreign question so I I guess you could say in web 2 marketing would be um you know selling a subscription service or selling access to a platform in exchange for uh the user's data right but in web3 there there aren't any subscriptions and we also don't collect users data so in that sense how how do you think about the user in web3 if

you're not selling them something that's a very good question um I don't think you necessarily need to sell something to someone to consider them when doing a brand there's a lot of Brands out there that are not necessarily about selling a product and thinking also about ngos you're actually asking for people to give you something and you don't give a lot in exchange maybe a little bracelet for Christmas but that's all and it still works so I don't think it matters so much but the lack of data is important so I also mentioned it in the talk because we don't know so much about the people and it makes communicating with them even

more important than in web2 thanks I think if there are no more questions then we'll wrap it up there thank you so much Leia for such an engaging talk [Applause]