Before entering Web3, should we first set up a sub-brand to test the waters?

Written by: Rubywang.eth

Despite the recent cooling of the NFT market, brands’ long-term deployment of web3 shows no signs of weakening:

• In the past week, Nike's swoosh platform sold 55,000 NFTs of OF1 series sneakers, generating over one million dollars in sales
• In the automotive industry, following Lamborghini and Porsche, Mercedes-Benz also officially announced last week that it is seriously entering the NFT field

**Should a brand enter web3 with the original brand, or establish a new web3 sub-brand? **

Mercedes-Benz opened a new "Mercedes-Benz NXT" account on the basis of the official push @MercedesBenz, hoping that NXT will be the main position for digital art and collections on the chain, and "establish a long-term commitment to a dedicated presence in the Web3 community."

👇 Official Twitter and official website 🔗

🐻 The city has not slowed down the pace of Mercedes-Benz's joining. The official mentioned that "after several months of preparation", three core series of NFTs will be launched.

NFT is curated by the creative studio "0xNXT":

• Generative Art: will cooperate with a famous generative artist and a group of collectors (the official tweet follows the founder of artblocks 🤔 hmm...)
• Release 1886 sets: gifted to the top customers of Mercedes-Benz (I guess it will be used as membership to unlock brand experience and activities)
• Design legacy series: Created by the chief design officer, linking brand stories and historical designs

It seems that the two major use cases "Phygital" and "Loyalty membership" have been recognized by these brands.

Consumer brands need to attract the attention of the audience, establish a direct connection with young people around the world, build communities through web3, and use NFT to deliver content and equity value will become more and more common.

As the standard configuration of web3, Twitter should be said to be the brand's preferred social media for official announcements.

Some brands choose to directly use the main Twitter account. For example, @gucci used the main account with 7 million fans when it officially announced the cooperation with Yuga Labs.

It reflects that cooperation with the web3 project is part of an important brand strategy, and "without fear" conveys confidence in NFT to its core audience consumers.

Similar reps include Starbucks (@starbucks), Lamborghini (@Lamborghini) and more.

The advantages of using the main account to send NFT and do web3 cooperation are obvious:

• Many fans, great influence
• Made NFT education to the main audience of the brand (and more likely to be respected by the core web3 community)

Of course, trade-off is, after all, the current proportion of NFT users is not high. If most of the fans of the original brand are not interested in NFT, the information of the project can easily be "buried" in other news sharing on the official push, and it may even be counterproductive.

Therefore, some other brands chose to open a new official push, such as

• Porsche @eth_porsche
• PUMA @PUMA
• Nike @dotSOOSH (and @rtfkt)

And declare in the profile that it is a virtual collection of the original brand/web3 community self-brand. The advantage is of course that it has a good connection with the parent brand and at the same time differentiates fans well, so that more content can be posted (shitposting 😂 ) without affecting the original mainstream audience.

As for the challenge, in addition to the initial number of fans and influence, if the name of the sub-brand is not chosen well, it is easy to be regarded as a scam or a similar twitter handle is bought and used by scammers, resulting in additional risks and operating costs.

🚨Porsche’s Twitter name starts with eth, I don’t know how many scammers have taken advantage of it😓

Therefore, in my opinion, the better way is: when it is first launched, it will be grandly introduced by the brand's official push, and then the long-term content release and community operation will use sub-brands to build a stronger mind; important content will maintain interaction with the parent brand. Push, boost influence.

For example, Adidas initially used the official 4 million fan account @adidasoriginals to launch the web3 project (more in line with the designer series).

Later upgraded the web3 brand to become @altsbyadidas and bought in Bored Ape and named this one Indigo (@indigo_herz).

Set up an exclusive account and upgrade to ALTS ambassador

This trick is actually quite clever. On social media, people are always more willing to interact with "people" rather than "companies". You can also see many celebrities and Crypto celebrities interacting with the Indigo series on Twitter, becoming the content source of UGC.

Of course, setting up a social media account is only the first small step for a brand to enter web3, and the final measurement of success still needs to be consistent with its overall strategy and goals:

• How to verify the value of web3, is it to promote physical sales, enhance user interaction or increase the layout of revenue sources (virtual goods)?
• Release NFT to reward more existing members, or hope to attract web3 native?

Looking forward to seeing more brands succeed in testing the waters, and the road to web3 will continue.