Author: nate
Compiled by: TechFlow
Our job as marketers is not to be the most technically savvy person in the company, but to be the best storyteller. Yet the stories we tell right now are boring and incoherent.
My favorite stories often come from movie franchises. I find that the best movies are not only compelling as standalones, but also tell great stories as a whole franchise. I've been particularly fond of Dune lately. Each Dune movie is wonderful in its own right, but when combined together, they form a magnificent epic. Add to that the amazing performances from Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and Javier Bardem, and the direction by Denis Villeneuve, and the cinematography, characterization, music, sound design, and CGI, and it's just amazing.
Of course, I’m not saying we need a cinematic masterpiece for a crypto company, but where is our story? There is little else besides endless product integration announcements, podcasts, and random posts. It’s all boring and lacks any story to tie it all together. Clearly, we’re just being haphazard.
Great storytelling requires careful thought and careful planning. Too many of us take a “cast a wide net” or “try it and see” approach. This approach may work when you’re initially experimenting with paid ads and where they’re placed, but it’s a foolish strategy for building a great brand. Your marketing can’t just rely on blog posts and random memes, especially if there’s no unifying theme between them. We need to do better, and we can do better.
Building a premium brand is like boiling a kettle of water. When you put the kettle on the stove, it doesn’t go from room temperature (a generic brand) to boiling (a famous brand) instantly. You need to keep adding heat (continuous marketing) to keep the temperature rising. If you factor in factors like lack of momentum (a company’s lack of traction), the water will reach boiling point even more slowly.
So how do you make water boil faster? Adding a little salt can help. In brand building , purposeful marketing is like the salt in the pot. If you are meticulous and thoughtful in planning your marketing communications and packaging, you’ll be able to increase brand awareness faster and keep it longer. You should always be asking yourself, “What role does this specific announcement play in my brand story?”
Frankly, all crypto marketers have a lot of room for improvement in this area. I think there are two main reasons why we marketing leaders, myself included, are not doing a good enough job in this area:
A. We are too prone to adjust our core message as industry trends change
B. We are too easily influenced by feedback from all sides (whether it’s from our CEO or team members)
It’s no secret that our industry suffers from a severe attention deficit. For memecoins and trading, this is driven by ever-changing trading trends (politics, animals, specific blockchains, etc.). But we also have ever-changing meta-narratives that completely capture the attention of the intellectual community on crypto Twitter. Off the top of my head, I can name three major meta-topics from the past year:
Modular architecture vs. monolithic architecture
Application Chain Theory and Application Specific Sorting (ASS, haha)
Solana and Ethereum
The point is not whether we work hard to make our projects relevant in these discussions. It’s smart to be able to capitalize on attention-grabbing topics and direct attention to yourself. However, problems arise when we over-pursue these narratives at the expense of consistency in our core brand message.
You can’t be the answer to every industry discussion at once, and not every topic will be relevant weeks later. Too often our colleagues, and even ourselves, get distracted by industry trends. In due course, these trends may impact your business strategy, but brands should always stay consistent and evolve thoughtfully. Related to this, quality feedback and suggestions are important, but you also need to know when to say no for the good of your brand.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but not all opinions are equal. Our CEO @0xLitquidity and I have had many discussions about our go-to-market strategy. When Vijay tells me that he wants to see certain types of dApps on Eclipse, I may raise some questions, but ultimately I respect his professional opinion because he has a decade of experience in the industry and I trust his business acumen. In short, I follow his advice in areas where he has more experience.
On the marketing side, this is my area of expertise. There have been times when I have shot down some of Vijay’s marketing suggestions because they didn’t fit into the overall narrative we were setting for Eclipse. Sometimes I’ve shot down ideas because their timing didn’t fit with the rest of our plans. I’ve also said to Vijay, “I’m going to hold my ground on this,” to push us to spend more on certain projects. I didn’t do this out of rebellion, I did it because it was my job. I wasn’t hired to be a “yes man,” I was hired to run our marketing engine effectively.
Likewise, I value feedback from the Eclipse team and colleagues. They often provide me with inspiration and great ideas. For example, most of the ASS content we recently launched was conceived by other members of my team, not me. This has helped us gain a lot of attention. However, even though my team is great, I still regularly veto some of their requests. I want to gain attention not only in the short term, but also in the long term. This requires me to consciously ensure that we are moving in the right direction.
This empowering approach is critical to maintaining a consistent voice for the brand. Just like only one person can drive a car, only one director can dictate the direction of a movie. If our brand doesn’t perform well, the blame doesn’t fall on my colleagues, it falls on me . If there’s a problem with the Eclipse brand, the first person to be held accountable is me.
That said, I realize these concepts can be abstract and easier to talk about than to implement, so I’m going to share the creation and evolution of our mascot @turbothecow in detail to help you better understand my point.
Turbo, Highland Cattle
Many people have asked about Turbo and whether they should create a mascot for their own projects. The simple answer is - probably not. To better explain this question, let's review the history of Turbo's birth.
Long before I joined, the core team at Eclipse had been discussing “thicc sequencers”. I’ll elaborate on this concept later. At the time, while the team had a strong fundraising announcement, Eclipse was still facing challenges in gaining sustained marketing attention. This is when Vijay approached me and we began to seriously discuss the possibility of me joining the company. On the day of my formal interview with Eclipse, I pointed out that the “intern trend” was outdated. Too many projects were jumping on the bandwagon and creating intern accounts to increase interaction and attract attention (Eclipse was doing this too). The problem was that only a few teams were doing it well, and it was becoming increasingly clear that many marketing teams were simply imitating successful cases.
This is a major flaw in industry marketing strategies. Leadership teams are often unwilling to take risks or invest money because they lack confidence. So when they see others succeed, they simply copy them instead of creating new and unique solutions. They feel it is safer to spend money on strategies that have already been proven to work, but the flaw in this logic is that these strategies are successful because they are unique and well thought out. Simply copying others often does not work well. If you are not the first to do something, you must do it better than those who came before you to stand out.
I refused to let our brand follow the same fate as those failed crypto companies. Eclipse had to be unique. So I decided to abandon the company’s previous strategy of trying to boost influence through intern accounts and try something new: create a mascot that would appeal to people even if they didn’t know Eclipse.
Around this time, our marketing people brought a Highland Cow to an art gallery in New York City, and it went viral. Many influencers outside the crypto Twitter circle uploaded photos with the cow and tagged Eclipse. This was my "aha" moment. The Highland Cow symbolized the heaviness of our collator and had the potential to spread widely. We found a good way to naturally connect this animal to our brand. This is why we chose the Highland Cow as our mascot, not to imitate other companies. We are creating brand stories in real time.
After deciding on the mascot, we started designing and naming it. Previously, Eclipse's marketing focused partly on speed, but it's clear that speed alone is no longer attractive. The concept of TPS is no longer new, and people no longer care if you are slightly faster than other blockchains (which is why we don't promote speed as the core of our brand). However, I didn't want to give up speed completely. After all, Eclipse is really fast. During brainstorming, I realized that the best way to show our speed is not to promote it directly, but to hint at it indirectly. It would be even better if it could be done in a unique way instead of being tied to other crypto projects. So I started looking for ideas from other fields.
Most of you may not know this, but I’m actually inspired by anime. When I approached our website and animation designers, I asked them to create around two main inspirations: Akira and Speed Racer. These inspirations, which have nothing to do with crypto, are what I think makes our brand and Turbo unique.
After many discussions and revisions, we finalized the new logo, brand colors, website design, and art for Turbo. We adopted a bold lime green aesthetic with the hero image front and center. A cute highland cow, blending 2D and 3D styles, driving fast cars and motorcycles, was designed to evoke associations with speed and our "heavy sequencer". The quality of the animation was significantly better than other mascots I've seen, making our design really stand out. We named him "Turbo" to add a pop of color to the overall design.
However, I quickly ran into a problem. Everyone at Eclipse was very excited and wanted to have their say. We were faced with a classic problem: too many opinions . I realized that if we were going to keep the momentum going, I needed to take control of Turbo's development. While I gave the Eclipse team a lot of praise, there were many cases where I just said no to the team's requests. Here are some examples:
A. The team wanted to invest a lot of money right away to produce more Turbo-related content. But I didn’t agree with such an investment without sufficient data support. So I collected data first and ultimately decided to increase investment in Turbo for three key data points:
A(1). Our content about Turbo performed much better on Twitter than any other post.
A(2). The community's enthusiasm for Turbo has been unprecedentedly high, and the large amount of artwork, memes, and other content created by community members makes me believe that we have indeed created something unique.
A(3). Even those who had no interest in Eclipse before began to contact us to learn about Turbo.
B. Team members suggested using Fiverr to mass produce more Turbo content, but I strongly disagreed. We are a lean team with less than 30 full-time employees. Our strength lies in quality, not quantity. Sacrificing quality to increase the number of animated videos would only make Turbo indistinguishable from other mascots, which would be self-destructive.
C. Team members also proposed to financialize Turbo and turn it into an NFT or memecoin. I absolutely disagree. We are building an open ecosystem where the developer community is free to try what they want, but the core team of Eclipse will not support Turbo's NFT collection or memecoin. The reason is simple. If we commit to it but the results are not ideal, it will consume all the goodwill and momentum we have accumulated with Turbo. In addition, doing so will greatly distract our product and engineering teams. I absolutely do not want to tie Turbo to the performance of a certain digital asset. Turbo is a brand asset that has more potential to attract the attention of the general public than Eclipse itself.
I share this not to brag, but to show how much we think about these issues behind the scenes. Turbo has resonated with our audience and has become one of our most effective marketing tools. So when you ask me, "Should I create a mascot?", it's not a simple "yes" or "no" question. The answer lies in whether you are willing to invest in the construction of a brand mascot. If you just draw an animal randomly, it will not do much for your brand. Water takes time to boil, and I feel like many people expect it to boil immediately.
To be honest, we're still in the early stages of Turbo's story. We haven't quite reached the point where we can leverage him or the overall Eclipse brand to the level of revolutionary success it has become. But we've been working hard behind the scenes to let the idea mature over time. Turbo is here to stay, and I'm very excited for you to see what we have planned for the next six months. We have some pretty bold plans. November is just the beginning.
I hope you enjoy all the upcoming Turbo content as we continue to build a complete story around Eclipse. I encourage you to think about your brand as a story as well. Find ways to string all of your announcements together and tie them into a core brand positioning or narrative. Believe in something! Make a commitment and take bold and calculated risks. Be a leader, not a follower.
So, what other topics have you found helpful? Rebranding? Brand positioning? Agencies (II)? Anything else? Let me know in the comments below.
Before that, let everything else pale in comparison.
This is more than just a meme to me. While marketers aren’t as technically savvy as engineers, we don’t need to be.
