There are few things that are undeniably true in this world.
The dominance of the market to make or break companies. The often ineffable will of this amorphous grouping of consumers is certainly one of them
Pundits may decry this, claiming that markets are nothing more than an expression of our skill to shape consumer wants. Technologist may lament this as false, approaching the world from a product-first perspective.
Though this is not simple as a concept, it is simply the truth of the matter.
Market first doesn’t mean you ask people what they want then build it. Or just throw stuff against the wall, Google style and see what sticks. And it certainly doesn’t obviate the very real need to sell new ideas hard and market new appeal creatively and authentically.
But markets, an aggregate of behaviors and communities, move by its own rules.
This is not old school thinking, it is simply reality.
One of those unbending rules of life. Intractable perhaps in concept, but highly malleable in other ways as broken into its atomic elements, it is comprised of human nature and behaviors, something we all know and as consumers, are the experts.
I’ve been impressed anew by the power of this all recently in the face of the rising tide of crypto as everyday drivers of what we think about and build upon for our projects.
What I truly love about the crypto space is the unbridled enthusiasm of the people. For change. For betterment. For innovation. This is its core inspiration and impact.
What has me smiling a lot lately is the realization of the crypto segment that indeed there is a market that you need to find.
Blog after blog, profound ditty after another on Twitter is deifying this newfound idea that if the market doesn’t want it, nothing else matters.
Incorporating ideas of product market fit into the market touching realities of the first Dapps. Sitting in meetups where deeply smart thinkers put up slides on this topic as if it their realization.
But maybe it is.
Maybe it is true that each generation or moreso in this case, every new technological shift brings with it, its own process of discovery. That each massive shift of the markets and our collective consumer behaviors redefines the need to rethink everything.
Not disdain it certainly. Not push aside the knowledge that preceded it, but respect the nuance of it. As in that nuance is the power of how to harness it.
What is unique about the crypto segment is that the economic power of it preceded any application of its usage besides obviously speculation and currency trading. The very idea has been economized massively before any application has found consumer market fit.
And consequently, the cycles of thought are driven by cycles of investment rather than an understanding of the behaviors of people or the true market itself. The discussion of tokenization of behaviors for example, are top down economic thought experiments rather than bottoms up behavioral ones, where the reality of the market lives.
Not an iota of sarcasm here.
If fact, the discussion cycles are so heady, so interesting and intellectual challenging that I get completely subsumed myself in the curiosity of it all. But once you get past the thinking of the protocol layers into Dapps, investors, pundits and crypto-economic geniuses are not the bellwethers of what will work. You the consumer, the market are.
Each of us—as individuals are experts on our own behaviors, on what feels right.
We are all stepping into a new future here together. As consumers. Certainly as marketers.
It is an interesting hybrid like nothing I have worked in prior.
Grounded in the power of the market like never before. Provable en mass by the very platforming of core behavioral reflexes into something new, with a twist.
A market pre-educated to the change they are participating in with no historical precedent.
A consumer with more knowledge and expected skin in the game by the very common conceptions around the economizing of the consumers behaviors that is everywhere around us.
This is going to be a renaissance age of marketing.
A new shift on core impulses. A revised narrative built on a more aware base with higher expectations than ever before.
A new language and shifted approach to storytelling that will be based not strictly on the impulses of the markets but on educating it as well.
Crypto as a revolution of thought, or a normalizing of change, changes the game in some new ways.
Not as a generations shift, but as an aggregate market shift.
As consumers, our very behaviors have never been in a larger experiment.
As product and platform builders, we have never before had to be as cognizant of the reflexive nature of each individual response cross a global market.
And as marketers and salespeople, we have never had to dig so deep in the very nature or our craft, the depth of knowledge of what we have built on prior and the need to rejigger it all in a new way for a new market era.
The marketers alongside the developers in this instance, are building something new together for a market very much yet to be discovered.
