In the last blog post, we discussed two (2) examples of how NFTs can be used by Caribbean Creatives – the use cases were Monetising & Distributing Art and Identifying & Rewarding Super Fans. In this latest blog post, as the title suggests, we are going to be discussing three (3) examples of how Caribbean Companies can use NFTs. In the event you aren’t familiar with the technology or you’re in need of a “refresher”, NFTs are used to easily prove & transfer ownership of items – these items can be natively digital, or they can represent “real world” concepts and objects. In summary, we’ll be discussing NFTs as a tool to support Marketing, Finance & Operations.

NFTs X Marketing

Marketing is a function of business that aims to influence behaviour, where the behaviour could be spending, attendance, sharing content or any other customer action a company indexes as important. For example, organisations may provide incentives to consumers to become a “first-time buyer” or a “repeat customer”. These incentives could take the form of “first time giveaways or memorabilia”, “loyalty rewards” for repeat purchases or any gamified combination of the two to acquire an initial buy and then retain the buyer’s business. Ironically, these incentives could be considered “tokens” as they represent a company’s “appreciation” or their interest in your spending power. Well, what if these tokens could be “digital”? They can be, through NFTs. For example, if you attended a company’s 20th Annual General Meeting, you could be gifted digital memorabilia for the occasion as NFTs – an “I was there” type keep sake. If the company indexes attendance as a desired behaviour, they could take it a step further and send everyone a monetary reward to their digital wallets at the 21st AGM but only if they have the 20th anniversary NFT. This would spark a desire from attendees for the organisation to issue new NFTs with the same utility, and it would inadvertently encourage future attendance if this type of “gamified” approach became a staple for the company’s future AGMs. Suddenly, you have “fanfare”/engagement and you’re growing event attendance. This entire process could be automated through a combination of QR code & location-based technologies, underpinned by blockchain/NFTs.

NFTs X Finance

Finance is the funding of a company’s business needs for commercial purposes. For example, if a company needs to raise money to fund research & development for a new product, they could do so through “crowd funding” – this would be considered “finance”. Typically, when people engage in crowdfunding, they ask the public for money and then the public gets an early version of the “product” (at best) or a simple “thank you” (at worst). Both could be seen as a “token of appreciation”. But what if this token was an NFT? It would give the organisation access to a new group of people looking for entrepreneurs to innovate using their technology; and the NFT could represent access to the future use of the product, or it could also be a simple “thank you” that lives in the supporter’s wallet forever. The NFT (if tradable) could also give supporters the opportunity to speculate, i.e if the product does well, the NFT does well or if the company goes on to do well, that they will eventually look to reward their earliest supporters who can be digitally tracked and gifted because of the token.

NFTs X Operations

According to Wikipedia (nd.) “Business operations is the harvesting of value from assets owned by a business. Assets can be either physical or intangible. An example of value derived from a physical asset, like a building, is rent. An example of value derived from an intangible asset, like an idea, is a royalty”. An idea (like a book, music or visual content) can be represented by an NFT and for the first time in history, businesses can automate and enforce royalty collection on these ideas because of blockchain technology. This is an innate advantage of leveraging the tech as it streamlines and improves a company’s operations.

So you see, these are three practical examples of how NFTs can be used by Caribbean Companies. In the next blog, we will discuss an example of how NFTs can be used by Caribbean Countries.