Can cryptocurrency brand marketing only rely on copying others’ success?

Original title: re: crypto marketing needs better storytelling
Original author: Nate, head of growth at Eclipse
Original translation: Zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's note:This article is about how the Eclipse team avoided blindly following the crypto industry and strengthened brand awareness by creating the mascot Turbo. They abandoned the "quick success" strategy, focused on the uniqueness and durability of the brand, drew design ideas from anime inspiration, and used high-quality content to create a differentiated effect. At the same time, they refused to financialize Turbo into NFTs or tokens to maintain the long-term value of the brand. This approach highlights the team's emphasis on marketing innovation and long-term influence.

The following is the original content (the original content has been reorganized for easier reading and understanding):

As marketers, our job is not to be the most technically savvy person in the company, but to be the best storyteller. But the reality is that the stories we tell are often boring and lack coherence.

My favorite stories come from movie franchises, where the best movies are not only great on their own, but also blend together to create an epic story. For example, the Dune series, which I love recently, each movie is fascinating in its own right, but together they build a grand narrative. Add Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Javier Bardem, and the directing skills of Denis Villeneuve - the visuals, character development, score, sound design and CG effects of the movie are simply perfect!

Of course, I'm not saying that we need to create cinematic masterpieces for crypto companies, but where is our narrative? Looking around, it's just endless product integration announcements, podcasts and various boring content, with no coherent story to connect them all. We are clearly joining in the fun.

Great storytelling requires care and clear intent, and too many of us adopt a “cast a wide net” or “throw a few arrows at a time” strategy. This may work when trying paid advertising, but it’s a foolish approach for brand building. Your marketing can’t just be a few blog posts and scattered memes, especially without a unifying theme. We can and should do better.

Building a great brand is like boiling a pot of water. Put the kettle on the stove. It doesn’t immediately go from room temperature (generic brand) to boiling (widely known). You need to keep adding heat (marketing) to gradually increase the temperature. If you factor in factors such as altitude (lack of company momentum), the boiling rate may be slower. So how do you make the water boil faster? This is where intentional marketing is the pinch of salt. If you put enough thought and preparation into your marketing communications and packaging, brand awareness will increase faster and longer. Always ask yourself, what role does this specific announcement play in my brand story?

To be honest, all crypto marketers have a lot of room for improvement in this area. I think we marketing leaders (including myself) are not doing well in the following two aspects: A. Too easily adjust the core message based on industry trends B. Too easily be swayed by various feedback from CEOs and teams

Our industry generally has a terrible collective "attention deficit", and the frequently changing trends driven by meme coins/trading (such as political themes, animal themes, specific chains, etc.) affect price movements. At the same time, the rational crypto community on Twitter is always attracted by one mainstream narrative after another. In the past year, several major topics in the industry include

Modularity vs. Integration

App Chain Theory vs. Application-Specific Sorting

Solana vs. Ethereum

The problem is not that we try to make projects relevant to these discussions, it is wise to use hot topics to attract attention and direct it to ourselves. But our problem is that we sacrificed too much of the core consistency of our brand in order to cater to these narratives.

You can't have the answer to every industry debate, and not every topic will last. Trends and feedback are important, but the brand should remain consistent and grow steadily. It can be considered when appropriate, but the focus should be on long-term brand building.

Of course, high-quality feedback is important, but you also need to know when to say no. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but not every opinion is equally important. For example, our CEO 0xLitquidity and I have gone back and forth on marketing plans many times. When he told me that he wanted to see specific types of dApps appear on Eclipse, I would ask for details, but ultimately respect his judgment because he has 10 years of experience and I trust his business acumen.

But when it comes to marketing, that's my profession, and I have vetoed some of Vijay's marketing suggestions more than once because they didn't fit the overall narrative of the Eclipse brand. Sometimes, I even insisted on increasing the budget to promote certain key initiatives. This is not opposition, but my responsibility. I was hired to run our marketing engine, not to be a "yes person".

Similarly, I also attach great importance to the feedback of the team, and they often bring me inspiration. For example, most of the "ASS" content we released recently came from the team's creativity, not me, which did help us gain a lot of attention. But I still often veto some of their suggestions, because I have to win not only temporary attention, but also long-term brand building. This kind of authorization is crucial to maintaining consistency in brand voice. Ultimately, if the brand performs poorly, the responsibility lies with me, not the team.

I know this is abstract, so I’ll share the creation and evolution of our mascot, TurboTheCow, in detail to explain these ideas more clearly.

Many people have asked whether Turbo should have its own mascot, and the short answer is - probably not. To better explain why, let’s take a look back at the birth of Turbo.

Before I joined, the core team at Eclipse had already been discussing “Thicc Sequencers”. But after the team released a well-performing funding announcement, Eclipse still had difficulty gaining sustained market attention. At this time, Vijay contacted me and we began to seriously discuss the possibility of me joining the company. On the day of my formal interview, I mentioned that the “intern trend” was out. At that time, many projects were following the trend and creating intern accounts to increase interaction and attract more attention (Eclipse was doing the same at the time). The problem is that only a few teams get it right, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that marketing teams are just blindly following the success of others.

This is one of the biggest problems with marketing strategies in this industry, leadership is unwilling to take risks and spend money because there’s a lack of conviction. So when they see others doing well, they choose to imitate rather than innovate. The logic is that they think it’s safer to invest resources in proven successes, but the problem is that these strategies are successful because they are unique and well thought out. Blind imitation usually doesn’t work. If you’re not the first to do something, you have to do it better than your predecessors to stand out.

I didn’t want to fall into this trap, and I didn’t want our brand to become another example of a failed crypto company. Eclipse had to be unique. So I decided to completely abandon the intern account that the company had previously tried to build and try something different: create a mascot that people could resonate around even if they didn’t know what Eclipse was.

At this time, our marketing team brought a Scottish Highland cow to an art gallery in New York City, which caused a crazy viral sensation. It wasn’t just influencers outside the crypto community who took photos and checked in at Eclipse, this was my “aha” moment. Highland cattle = thick sorter, Highland cattle = mainstream communication. In this way, we made an organic and clever connection between this animal and our brand. So, Highland cattle became our mascot, not imitating others, but creating a brand story in real time.

Once we had the animal, it was time to design and name it. Eclipse had previously been partly about speed, but speed itself was no longer appealing. TPS (transactions per second) is a thing of the past, and no one cares if your blockchain is a little faster than anyone else (which is why we don’t use speed as a core brand narrative), but I didn’t want to give up on speed completely, after all, Eclipse is really fast. During the ideation process, I realized that the best way to show our speed was not to advertise it directly, but to hint at it indirectly, and preferably without being linked to other crypto projects. So I started looking for inspiration outside of the crypto community.

Most people may not know that I was actually inspired by anime. When I approached the website and animation designers, I asked them to incorporate two core inspirations into our brand visuals: Akira and Speed Racer. These non-crypto-related inspirations are what make our brand and Turbo unique.

After several design adjustments, we finally decided on the new logo, brand colors, website design, and image of Turbo. A bold lime green style with the hero character at the center of the visual. A cute, 2D and 3D Highland Cow driving a sports car and a motorcycle symbolizes speed and relates to our "thick sorter". The animation quality is also significantly higher than other mascots, making our design stand out. In the end, we chose "Turbo" as the mascot name, which was the icing on the cake.

However, problems followed. Everyone at Eclipse was very excited and wanted to provide suggestions. This was a classic "too many cooks" problem. I quickly realized that in order to maintain momentum, the idea of Turbo had to be protected. Although I was very grateful for the enthusiasm of the team members, I rejected some suggestions many times.

Here are some examples:

A. The team wanted to invest a large amount of money immediately to increase the content output of Turbo. I was not sure whether this was a reasonable expenditure and did not make a decision until I collected more data.

Finally, I decided to invest in Turbo based on the following three data points:

(1). The Turbo-related content we posted on Twitter performed significantly better than other content;

(2). The community's support for Turbo was unprecedented, and the community created a large number of artworks, memes, and related content, which made me believe that we really created something unique;

(3). Even people who had never paid attention to Eclipse began to contact the team because of Turbo.

B. Team members suggested using Fiverr to mass produce Turbo content. I flatly refused. We are a lean team of less than 30 people, and our strength lies in quality rather than quantity. If quality is sacrificed for quantity, Turbo will become featureless and no different from other mascots.

C. Team members want to financialize Turbo and turn it into an NFT or Memecoin. Absolutely not. We are building a permissionless ecosystem, so the developer community can try it out on their own, but the Eclipse core team will not launch an NFT or Memecoin for Turbo. The reason is that if we invest in these and they ultimately perform poorly, it will burn the word-of-mouth and momentum we have accumulated. In addition, this will greatly distract our product/engineering team. Turbo is a brand asset that has the potential to resonate with ordinary users more than Eclipse.

The above is not to brag, but to show the deep thinking behind it. Turbo resonated with our audience and became one of our most successful marketing tools. So when you ask me "Should I make a mascot?", it's not a simple "yes" or "no" question.

The answer depends on whether you are willing to really invest in creating a meaningful brand mascot. If you just draw an animal at random, it will not bring real results to your brand. Boiling water takes time, and I feel like many people want to see it boil right away.

「Original link」