Heading into day two of NFT.NYC, I continued my search for insight into how brands are leveraging this new technology and even what the future may hold for NFT use cases for enterprise. I sat in on a panel from Coach, SAP and Estee Lauder on how they launched their first NFT campaigns, as well as a session from Rajat Rajbhandari, the CIO and Co-Founder of DexFreight, on the potential that NFTs must revolutionize mobility and supply chains.
Similar to day one of the conference, main talking points centered around brands that are coming into the NFT space must be authentic, avoid coming off gimmicky and to future proof the NFT experience your brand wants to deliver so it can evolve and bring new value continuously. Nicolle Sternberger, Global Head of Go-to-Market (GTM) Success Factors for SAP, presented how SAP successfully launched their first NFT campaign around those parameters. Sternberger mentions that SAP is maniacal about treating not only their customers but their own employees well and provides dividends for them for their loyalty to the brand, NFTs allow for another avenue to tap into that. SAP began by focusing on how to provide value internally. So, when SAP was planning on awarding one of their internal teams their very own Line of Business of the Year award, they wanted to do it in a new way by breaking that award up into an NFT for each member of the winning internal team. Once the NFT was claimed by the winning SAP Success Factors team, it could be used as a credential integrated on LinkedIn to showcase the recognition they’ve received in their own digital trophy case, which will be added to with more internal awards.
Renee Klein, VP of Global Digital Experience for Coach, broke down how they approached their first NFT campaign by focusing on their customers. Partnering with VaynerMedia and NFT.Kred, Coach launched an NFT collection made up of eight different animal characters from their 2021 Holiday Game Snow City and gave away 80 NFTs via daily drops. Staying authentic with NFTs derived from their own assets, these NFTs were also minted on Polygon, a user-friendly blockchain, for free without the need for an existing digital wallet, to ensure accessibility for their audience. Each drop from Coach’s first NFT collection was sold out completely in under a minute.
Coach’s holiday NFT collection provided value to its customers in two different ways. The first being able to trade and sell the NFT for a significant amount of Ethereum and the second being if a customer held onto the NFT they will be able to redeem a customizable Coach Rogue Bag later this year. Through creating scarcity, providing real-world utility and making the NFTs accessible to a non-native Web 3 audience, Coach successfully created the beginning journey of their NFT ecosystem.
My final session of the day was with Rajat Rajbhandari on the future of NFTs in the enterprise world and the potential for them to solve problems in supply chains. Rajbhandari, CIO and Co-Founder of DexFreight, a decentralized blockchain logistics platform, began with explaining a huge problem that arises continuously in supply chains which is the overwhelming amount of fraud with fake warehouse receipts, certificates and letters of credit. This ultimately creates a “lemons problem,” often used to refer to the used car market but can also be applied to the supply chain. As these traditional digital assets are aggregated, broken, collateralized, sold and resold, it creates an information asymmetry between buyers and sellers. Rajbhandari explains that NFTs can help solve the amount of ongoing theft occurring in the global supply chain. By taking all these traditional digital assets and creating them into NFTs, making them immutable and verifiable, Rajbhandari believes this would help solve the “lemons problem” for the buyers as it provides assurance of validity. Rajbhandari notes that this is still something that will not happen maybe even this decade. For NFTs to be adopted on the enterprise-level, there needs to be more legal recognition of NFTs so in the instance of a fraud case, an NFT with a real certificate will be valid and verified through the court system.
If you’re a brand looking to launch their first NFT campaign, remember to stay authentic and think about your audience and how you can make it more accessible for them.
Interested in future use cases of NFTs in the enterprise world and want to learn more about my experience at NFT.NYC? Stay tuned for day three coverage tomorrow! Feel free to reach out to the 10Fold team to discuss how we can help leverage your unique process!