Enabling new marketing ideas thanks to the blockchain

Blockchain technology is here to stay, that is a fact, it is not the future anymore but something the majority of the companies should at least be curious to learn. Probably the first things that come to our minds when we think about the blockchain are the Bitcoin, NFTs and Elon Musk, but that is only the 1% (or less) of the things you can do with this disruptive technology.

When it comes to real business use cases, brands can easily get the benefit from this technology in their daily tasks, today I would like to highlight three of them:

1. No more fake ratings

When we check the ratings of a product on Amazon or any other marketplace, we believe they are real, but some of them could seem suspicious to be fake or paid reviews with the only purpose of increasing the visibility of the product. Thanks to the blockchain we could avoid having fake identities rating products and achieve total trust and transparency when evaluating a product by the community.

An example of blockchain products for this use case is Review.Network.

2. Relevant loyalty programs

Most of the loyalty programs of famous brands are based on points assigned by an algorithm depending on the behavior or the level of engagement of the customers with the brand. But they are just numbers and, in most of the cases, implementing this is technically complex as it involves many different systems and stakeholders across the company, apart from all the marketing campaigns needed to enable the customers with this program.

Once these programs are running, customers can exchange the points for special discounts or other products but, what if we allow customers to be part of the brand or get benefit from other third-party programs?

With the blockchain we can achieve both options: providing tokens instead of points to the customers, so they have the ability to make decisions about the brand (for example, when a new product is planned to be launched) or to centralize in the same blockchain layer other loyalty programs (for example, to get discounts on other related brands).

One of the latest examples is the airline AirBaltic, launching a set of NFTs whose owners can get several benefits connected to the AirBaltic Club. You can read all the details here.

There are also products like Loyyal that can be applied to any brand that wants to implement a loyalty program based on the blockchain.

3. Supply Chain Management & Support Services

Nowadays it requires a lot of effort in terms of technology and resources to keep a track of the life cycle of a product, from the moment it is made until the customers decides to stop using it, from the logistics and the single product purchase points of view. There are already many blockchain projects focused on keeping a track of the end-to-end process, and where any product can be involved (oil, diamonds, wine, food, cargo, fashion…).

Thanks to this, as an example, customer service teams will be able to get all the details about the product when the customers creates a case to get support, avoiding any kind of fraud, or just simply keep the customer centric mantra.

One very interesting example is Brilliant Earth, one of the first jewelers to offer blockchain-enabled diamonds at scale, to seamlessly and securely track gemstone origin and provide greater customers assurance.

. . . anything you can imagine!

Yes, with the blockchain there are no limits, anything you can imagine and would like to implement in your business is possible. The technology is there, we just need to find the right skills and resources to bring it up to life.

We can also find other interesting ideas on how people are using blockchain:

• LegalFling, to verify sexual consent
• LO3 Energy, to share solar power with other residents
• Dentacoin, a blockchain solution for the global dental industry to keep a track of the dental records
• The luxury brand Hublot partners with Ledger to include a crypto wallet in the watch