New Marketing Strategy

General
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Our current marketing strategy relies on the statement that “Peercoin is digital gold”. I will highlight some of the problems with this, propose an alternative concept, then I ask you to help me make it simple, pretty, and effective while still conveying the same meaning.

Digital Gold
This form of marketing highlights peercoin as a store of value. While peercoins themselves can be valuable, a good store of value requires a somewhat stable or increasing price, which peercoin clearly lacks. Beyond that, the PoS protocol makes peercoins essential as a consensus token, which gives them more purpose than something like gold. So we are trying to make peercoin fit into a box it doesn’t belong in and ignoring features about it that make it stand out.

a sustainable ledger for immutable settlements
Sustainability is Peercoin’s number 1 benefit, hence the leaf logo. ‘Settlements’ is a broad word that gives room for other tokens of value that will be introduced with PeerAssets. Immutability is really what we are selling, both for meta transactions using OP_RETURN and P2TH as well as the actual Peercoin transactions themselves. Ideally, we would want to convey all three of these words in a snappy, short, effective message.

So please help brainstorm and/or come up with a new strategy. This should be something that anyone can participate in without technical ability, it only requires comprehension of the new direction we’re trying to take peercoin. Feel free to speak up!

3 Likes
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good call, sadly I have come to this conclusion as well.

To sum up, these are some properties of peercoin:

most fair distribution AFAIK
if Moores law is valid, inflation rate will decrease
maintainable with less power consumption with POS
small blockchain
immutable
can store data in OP_RETURN (with PARS)
can deflate if more ppc gets burned than created
PeerAssets can build on top

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When people talk about Peercoin as a store of value, I think they are talking about two separate things.

The first concept of store of value is the idea that Peercoin is a better digital replacement for gold than Bitcoin is. It’s the idea that storing your wealth in Peercoin will help it maintain its dollar value. That is not something we can count on at the current moment due to the volatility of cryptos. Maybe in the far future, but certainly not now.

The second concept of store of value is the idea that you can store your wealth in a distributed network that is resistant to coercion or censorship from governments. It may not maintain its price value in terms of dollars, but it will physically be much more secure in decentralized form than if you had kept it in a bank where the funds can be frozen or stolen.

So there are two separate meanings for store of value in my opinion. Peercoin tries to cover both of them, but is currently succeeding with the latter concept more than the former. It will take a long time and use of the network to see if the former can become true as well.

And while these are important goals that Peercoin aims to fulfill, I think we have discovered over the last couple years that it’s very difficult to market Peercoin on store of value and decentralization alone. We need something much more attractive to draw users and developers to Peercoin.

This change in approach to marketing Peercoin is not something new. We’ve been talking about it at peercoin.chat for a little bit now, in fact we just had a recent meeting with Sunny King about it. Part of the meeting was about transitioning Peercoin’s marketing from talking about it as a currency to focusing on marketing the blockchain itself.

Thankfully Peercoin is perfectly setup to move the discussion toward focusing on the blockchain as a distributed, sustainable and immutable ledger for settlements as Nagalim says. The blockchain is able to do so much more than just provide a way to store value or transact with coins.

We want to focus on these new use cases and potential applications, because that is where the excitement and energy is really at. That is what can possibly draw people to Peercoin in record numbers. Store of value and decentralization will always be long-term goals of Peercoin, but the network needs more use cases that will make it more useful, attractive and valuable to people.

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By the way, Peerchemist is the one who began pushing for this new direction and I believe he is best able to communicate it clearly to everyone here. I’m looking forward to his post about it.

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Being around a while in crypto I believe the store of value concepts Sentinelrv describes will certainly be strengthened by higher utilisation. I believe a block chain in itself, even an improved one like Peercoin can only provide limited value and may not be able to sustain itself in the long term. A block chain is like being an ISP on the internet. Nice to have a connection but you will need content and applications to make it really useful. Therefore I believe the real value-add will be on services provided on top of it. For the internet is that e.g. creating websites, selling certificates, email applications. The Peercoin equivalent would be the applications like the coloured coins type solutions hrobeers and peerchemist are working on (check out their new https://github.com/PeerAssets/mercator ).

The layer on top of that for the internet is making a business selling all kinds of goods and services through the website. The highest value-add is usually at this level.
For Peercoin would that be the business using the coloured coin Peercoin applications to manage ICOs or issue coins representing certain assets or other tokens.

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peercoin has to differentiate itself from the competitors. Say why is it better than Decred which is also POS+POW?

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The reason why I think PPC is a great coin is because there is an alignment of interests, the interest of the holders. In bitcoin instead there are 2 interests, the one of the holders and the one of the miners. I think over time this problem will become bigger and bigger as the block reward drops. We can already observe the disconnect bitcoin is facing with segregated witness. Unlike sunny who believes that the issue will be the energy consumption I believe the issue would be the conflicting interests between miners and holders. In PPC we would probably have no issues implementing a change that is good for the holders. The issue that I see is that most people are completely unaware of PPC. I think what we should do is some PR. After all the price of ETH has started its rise only after it has been spammed on reddit. It’s unclear who did the spamming, as for example vitalik was publicly against it, but it’s obvious that ETH has benefited massively from this notoriety. Crypto assets are strongly based on self-fulfilling prophecy. They have value because people believe they have value. I don’t fully buy the idea that PPC is not yet ready for adoption. I am instead worried that it may go into oblivion if it doesn’t grow. Unlike stocks were there is often a complete disconnect between price and value in an asset like currency where the value is simply based on the belief of value the price is actually important, especially in an open source project where for example it is the growth in the visibility that will attract developers, enthusiasts, investors, etc. if you compare PPC with LTC there is actually no comparison. LTC is a BTC clone whereas PPC is a brilliant product. However LTC gets a lot more visibility. The fact that coins like LTC have a decent market cap is in my opinion proof that some people are seeking to diversify away from BTC. The issue is that they don’t know that PPC exists so they diversify in stuff like LTC.

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Digital gold:

In this context gold is considered a “store of value”, as @Nagalim pointed out with somewhat naive words stating that store of value is something that has “stable or increasing price”. However there is no such thing in the world that guarantees stable or increasing price. It is just impossible, economy it is all about boom&bust cycles. At the moment gold is in the bubble and so we speak about it being store of value, so it is purely speculative and is subject to trend. In few years we will speak of something else.

Check gold price in last 26 years:

Good old boom and bust.

IMHO gold is worthless beyond utility as technical metal, a building material. It is not exceptionally rare and it is just a matter of time before someone figures out how to dig out a lot more of it from deep underground. It is also mined daily, in small quantities though. Most of it’s value comes from notion that it is “rare” and inflation is quite low.

Digital gold, now that is a different story. Metal gold has to be mined, refined, transported, traded and then properly and securely stored (I wonder how much of a price comes from overhead costs of this process alone) so many people do not hold it at home but keep it at remote banks or so called “gold exchanges”. In this aspect it is not a good store of anything but financial risk as you have to trust so many 3rd party factors with your property. Metal gold can also be seized by govt while it is sitting in a vault somewhere.
In conclusion, gold is relatively rare and that is about it (it also has that historic charm).

So idea of digital gold is very appealing for masses, basically it should be just like gold (rare, low inflation) and something that you can send as easily as your nudies on Snapchat.
I would guess that in early days of Bitcoin, while small community of enthusiasts wondered on how to justify holding Bitcoin and getting new supporters invented this concept of “digital gold”, referring on Bitcoin’s capped supply. It is still common for people who are into cryptocurrency to think like this, that scarcity is what gives it value.
What they are saying is that Bitcoin (or similar clones) solve the problems with gold I’ve listed above while staying rare, and that is about it. (they do skip the fact that actual gold does not magically “halve” the inflation every 4 years, and does not have limited supply - supply is unknown.)

To conclude, Peercoin is superior to both gold and Bitcoin in this regard as it emulates the metal gold better than Bitcoin:

  • it simulates the new supply of freshly mined gold via fixed 1% PoS inflation without abrupt changes in inflation
  • it comes up with new coins continuously like gold which is mined for at least 10k years (this also makes up for lost coins)
  • It is equally free of govt influence, but is also free of 3rd party miners which is equally important.

@supperppc has already touched this last point in greater detail:

[quote=superppc]
The reason why I think PPC is a great coin is because there is an alignment of interests, the interest of the holders. In bitcoin instead there are 2 interests, the one of the holders and the one of the miners. I think over time this problem will become bigger and bigger as the block reward drops. We can already observe the disconnect bitcoin is facing with segregated witness. Unlike sunny who believes that the issue will be the energy consumption I believe the issue would be the conflicting interests between miners and holders. In PPC we would probably have no issues implementing a change that is good for the holders. [/quote]

I also agree with superppc that relying on 3rd party (miners) for security is way bigger problem than energy consumption of PoW process. Peercoin has fixed that.

Conclusion is: Peercoin is good digital gold.
(but the hype of this concept is drying out as market matures, so we should move away from it)

Sustainable ledger for immutable settlements:

This is concept that became popular only after projects like various “colored coins” protocol and then Ethereum delivered more than a “coin” based on blockchain technology. This was only possible after people realized that blockchain delivered immutable, distributed database which also can make parties that otherwise would not trust each other to come to an agreement.

You can notice Bitcoin fanboys trying to fight this concept as it crashes their narrow world view bubble. (Just an example: https://twitter.com/peerchemist/status/814522872983068672)

What this concept tells us is that blockchain has more uses than something to relay “coins” from address to address, and thus it favors the blockchains where “coins” are used as fee to use the network’s blockchain. Do not confuse burning the coins with schemes where fee goes to block miner, burning the fee is relevant in this concept - nothing else.

In this regard Peercoin is totally same as any other blockchain where fee is burned, with one key difference - sustainability.

Peercoin is extraordinary cheap to keep operational, and security of the network does not depend on the market capitalization.

So: immutable, secure and sustainable public ledger.

Looking forward to hear more thoughts on this subject.

1 Like
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Amen!

I couldn’t agree more with what @peerchemist just wrote

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Peercoin is Digital Gold - As Peerchemist says, Peercoin is good digital gold. But this is an expectation of any investable cryptocurrency. It’s like Audi marketing a new car as “High quality”. Yes, of course the car is of high quality, but Audi would certainly not win any customers with this statement. It is an automatic expectation that the car is of high quality, and advertising it as such detracts from the car and makes it look cheap.

Who are we currently targeting?

  • Price Speculators/Investors. Our marketing is currently focused on attracting people who will buy/hoard and maybe mint their coins for 1% annual reward. With this strategy, we are touting peercoin as an investment that may go up in dollar value
  • Merchants. We are marketing Peercoin to small businesses (Get paid instantly! Avoid chargebacks! Cut out transactions fees!)
  • Miners. “Use your bitcoin mining gear and earn some Peercoins so you can sell for those sweet dollars”

We are selling ourselves a little short. At the moment our mantra is: “Buy/Mint some PPC, they may go up in value so you can sell for $” or “Accept PPC on your website, maybe somebody will buy something from your store if you accept it? Maybe?”

Who should we be targeting?
Our target audience is so large that it would be hard to market to everyone - should we target businesses or individuals? Price speculators or developers? I think it’s important we define our target audience before implementing a new strategy.

[quote=Cybnate]
I believe the real value-add will be on services provided on top of it. For the internet is that e.g. creating websites, selling certificates, email applications. The Peercoin equivalent would be the applications like the coloured coins type solutions hrobeers and peerchemist are working on (check out their new https://github.com/PeerAssets/mercator ).[/quote]

I am in agreement with Cybnate that the real value creation will be in services provided on top of Peercoin. With this in mind, should we adapt our marketing campaign to people that can actually use Peercoin and Peerassets? For example, developers, businesses and individuals that could benefit from issuing and transacting assets. The “immutable, secure and sustainable public ledger.” tag-line certainly seems to be more focused on these groups of people.

To summarize, could we re-focus our marketing on attracting developers who can add value to the network and businesses/individuals who will benefit from actually using Peercoin/Peerassets? This should organically increase the number of price speculators, investors, merchants and miners – two birds one stone.

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I agree with Cybnate and personage here. I 'll skip the subject of gold (priced in a fiat currency) and get to the meat of it:

Peercoin has to appeal entrepreneurs/developers who have a great idea and want to use PeerAssets we may not have thought of yet.

Peercoin will never be money to use at starbucks, but as a “immutable, secure and sustainable public ledger.” peercoin comes out as a winner.

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I think we should target 2 groups: developers to increase the size of the team and speculators (ideally from the ETH/ETC crowd, most of those people think that vitalik is inventing POS and that it is a novel feature).

Merchants it wouldn’t really make sense, what are the odds that they end up making a sale in PPC?

The low market cap would make it very attractive to developers as they can buy at a small price and then try to make improvements just like the early bitcoin developers did.

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There is a big difference, you should see it relative to the coin supply.
Early bitcoin devs could buy a large percentage of the coin supply at a cheap price, orders of magnitude cheaper than the same percentage of ppc.

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Yes but most people in crypto have already purchased bitcoin when the prices were low. Today a developer could buy 1% of all PPC for 50 bitcoins which they may have paid $500 if they bought before 2013.

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Marketing strategy title:
“Immutable, secure, and sustainable public ledger”

Target Audience:
Developers
Investors

This title addresses developers by referencing a contract language (immutable, public, ledger) that has gained favor amongst recent cryptocurrency projects. The title addresses investors by referencing profitable concepts (secure, sustainable).

I’d like to debate the order of the words and/or the use of the word ‘immutable’. For all readers a snappy beginning to the title will help ensure the reader continues to read the rest of the words. Perhaps “Sustainable, secure, and immutable public ledger”? Referencing efficiency first would go along with the leaf branding as well.

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Are you trying to come up with a slogan for the website? What is the significance of the order of the words besides using them to understand what and who we are marketing to? For reference, Peercoin’s slogan has always been “The Secure and Sustainable Cryptocoin” with recent suggestions shortening it to “Secure and Sustainable.”

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Catchy logos, slogans, tag lines, and branding only go so far…

We need a better strategy than this… The avalanche of adopters isn’t here because they don’t like our logo, slogans, tag lines, and branding.

The problem we have, is that current holders of Peercoin want to attract non-holders of Peercoin.

A non-holder of Peercoin, is attracted to the idea of getting some, if everyone else around them seems to have Peercoin and talk about Peercoin.

As a community we need to be more vocal and visual about how great Peercoin is and create a desire for non-holders to become holders.

More than holding, we need to prove that Peercoin currently is used in a real world solution, that scales and will continue to grow.

Right now we seem to have a flashy train on the tracks, and we’re calling people “all aboard”, but no one is running to get on the train.

So the solution seems to be “oh, let’s paint the train a new color? maybe add some marketing slogans to the chain?”

No. We need to show where the train came from, where it is now, where it is going, and that the train is about to pull out of the station and you’re either on, or you stay off… (only to be disappointed that ticket prices go up substantially later).

So if we can visualize a train, ticket holders, a destination, a train schedule, and the rest of it. Maybe it’s easier to reverse engineer how a decentralized community can decentrally market the coin.

It’s not tough to brainstorm a great path, as long as we all start off working together…

Did anything I say resonate?

1 Like
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Yes, it makes sense, however I think what is being talked about here is more than just changing slogans and logos. We’ve already gone through a visual rebranding phase with our logos and such things, but our messaging still remains to be updated. Part of doing that requires figuring out exactly what you said here…

It first requires understanding of the specific things that makes Peercoin a superior technology, how we’ve been trying to advertise these things and who we’ve been targeting all this time. Then the realization comes that Peercoin is much more than what we have been advertising this whole time and the fact that we’ve been focusing on marketing to the wrong groups of people.

I would say that we are currently in the process of finishing the train tracks (PeerAssets) that will lead our train (Peercoin) to its eventual destination. In the meantime while our developers are still laying our tracks, we have been doing what we can to make sure our train looks sleek and attractive for when it comes time to depart the station. Part of that process requires figuring out how to describe our ultimate destination to potential travelers so that they are encouraged to purchase a ticket and hop on board. That is what we are currently trying to do here.

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The DAC I’m going to build on PeerAssets will make it possible to generate ppc using regular CPUs.

So this one would solve the issue on how people can get peercoins without having to buy through exchanges or investing in ASICs.
It will bring us back to the old days where you could CPU mine the coin.

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“It will bring us back to the old days”
Promises, promises.

I agree that part of the job here is to find out who is riding the train where. It’s easy to see the utopian land where everyone uses ppc for everything, but when our train is looking shoddy and run down that’s difficult. Well, we just got a new paint job and we’re ready to try boarding again. So while the slogan for our company is “Secure and Sustainable”, the name of this particular trip down the tracks is something more like “Sustainable, secure, and immutable public ledger”. The reason we add the last three words is to try to draw in open source developers, because we need them a lot for this particular trip. We’re trying to board up with useful people, because this journey isn’t just to a new place, it’s a trip to settle a new area. To get the travelers we want, we don’t just say “the trip is safe and will go far”, we also say “and the work done while on it is fair and open to everyone”.