3 technical challenges beverage brands face with NFT
NFT has been hyped in the past years with some media stunts with Sotheby’s. The platform Opensea has been one of the hubs for web3 people to mint and sell their NFTs but failed to seriously come up with something beverage brands can use to run campaigns with some meaningful impact on their sales.
In this article, we’ll focus on 3 technical reasons why beverage brands are not able to take advantage of this new technology.
Complexity
A seed phrase is a sequence of 12 or 24 random words that provide the information required to recover a lost or damaged cryptocurrency wallet. It is also referred to as a mnemonic phrase and is best understood as a security measure for digital assets held in personal custody. Who the hell want to store 12 words on a piece of paper to recover a wallet?
At the moment, if you want to buy an NFT, you’ll need to have some serious knowledge of web3 before you make a purchase. You’ll need to have a wallet first, and buy some crypto that is accepted by Opensea. These 2 requirements set up a high barrier to entry for the regular Joe.
Some people don’t even understand what’s a wallet and get turned off if you ask them to store 12 words to recover your wallet (say what?).
For crypto purchases now, let’s be fair, it has become simpler but not simple. Hence, selling NFTs is still a problem but web3 platforms insist on accepting cryptos only. That’s a barrier that could be torn down if NFTs could be purchased with any form of payment instead.
For now, web3 platforms are enamored with being crypto. One factor that can enable mass adoption is to let people buy with any payment method and make the process of owning a wallet flawless.
Ecosystem
When you realize that a NFT is just one piece of the puzzle and there’s way more work than you expected
Let’s assume that beverage brands can solve this first challenge, what’s next?
They would have to work with several venues and partner with them so each NFT holder can benefit from something, whatever that is.
In other words, beverage brands would need to build a platform to list down a compelling value proposition for NFT holders AND partners distributing their products to align with to deliver the benefit in a system-driven way.
A simple NFT itself is not useful if a beverage brand doesn’t have a platform with an ecosystem built behind it.
Simplicity
At the moment, building a reliable process to get customers is the main challenge. Solving this by technically connecting each step seamlessly for customers would help to drive up adoption for beverage brands
Currently, web3 is too fluffy for beverage brands. It’s full of jargon that turns off people. Brands in general need to run some campaigns with a clear objective and have a budget to execute them.
The beverage brand Starbucks ended up sunsetting its NFT program within less than 2 years. The main reason is traction as only 58,000 people experienced it.
There should be a platform enabling brands to solely focus on the value proposition they want to give out to the market and look at the numbers of users they manage to reach and convert. At the moment, beverage brands need to mint NFTs and sell them on a platform, connect these NFTs somewhat on a wallet, and get them recognized by some real-world business partners.
The minute beverage brands can come up with an attractive value proposition and a simple way to use it. NFT will be successful. Not because it’s a NFT.
