As brilliant engineers build the disruptive apps of tomorrow todays incumbents double down with vigour in order to protect their markets and their valuation. The centralised nature of traditional businesses holds true for all major product sectors where each is dominated by a handful of billion dollar companies. These companies have everything to lose and can deploy hundreds of millions in fiat currency to protect their market. Fortune 500 companies much like central banks regularly issue new shares, minutely diluting the value of existing ones, but allowing them to raise large amounts of funds.
The upcoming generation of blockchain application creators will be faced with the grisly task of marketing their products in an environment that has evolved to become an extension of their competitor’s protective moat. Marketing and user acquisition costs are exorbitant because the major players have priced all the smaller ones out of the market. Google AdWords cost per clicks (CPCs) for insurance, banking and health service related keywords are three figure ones (for a single click!), because the nature of the platform facilitates the exclusion of smaller players simply by out bidding them (often for their own brand name) long enough to cut them out of the game. Ad Platforms proactively encourage this activity as it generates greater revenues for them, with Google going as far as assuring corporations that “Google won’t investigate or restrict the selection of trademarks as keywords, even if we receive a trademark complaint.” in their knowledgebase.
In its current state of play very little can be done by a new entrant to level the field and deploy large scale marketing campaigns, as invariably this will be drowned out by the noise of the wider market, with very little chance of positive ROI due to the high user acquisition costs brought about by inefficiencies in traditional marketing methodologies. RefToken will fix this equilibrium by providing a platform for blockchain based applications to deploy global marketing campaigns easily and on a pay-per-performance basis. RefToken’s affiliate platform will allow brands of all sizes to cooperate with influencers, content creators and marketers to promote their products, paying them a pre-agreed amount for each user the successfully refer.
A practical user case would be a start-up with limited seed funding based in Spain looking to enter the lucrative Swedish market. The start-up forecasts that the average Swedish user’s life time value is €450 compared to €120 for their domestic market, however the costs of engaging a marketing agency to conceptualise a campaign, produce creative, deploy the campaign, as well as their ongoing fees are prohibitive and exposes the company to the possibility of a significant impact to their bottom-line. RefToken empowers the start-up to connect with bloggers, influencers and media outlets in their target market and offer them a bespoke deal that would assure them of a profit after they pay their affiliate the pre-agreed amount for each client they refer (limited to 100 clients as a test for the first month). Once the start-up assesses the profitability of the arrangement they are able to scale this month on month growing their company without risking profitability at any point. Should the deal not be profitable the company can re-negotiate the deal in order for it to be equitable to both parties.
RefToken will democratise the ability to deploy global marketing campaigns by breaking down barriers between merchants and content creators, eliminating the middle-men that facilitate the pricing out of smaller players by erecting artificial protocols that impede competition. Nascent blockchain applications utilising the RefToken platform will be able to leverage the knowledge and networks of thousands of affiliates from all markets to deploy truly effective international marketing campaigns without requiring weeks of market research, having to hire translators or write a single blog post.