One of Zcash’s competitors has recently delivered a world-class marketing video.
Notice how it focuses primarily on people and a story, not the intricacies of cryptography features. I feel like appropriate marketing for Zcash should describe why people (real or hypothetical) are using Zcash. Our marketing efforts fall on deaf ears whenever they dive too deep into the characteristics of the Zcash protocol (the original ZM videos dove too deep into the trusted parameters work… for regular people, they can’t understand what or why that matters).
Great marketing is about sharing uplifting, creative, and often relatable situation(s).
You realize that there is a vast chasm separating Bitcoin and Ethereum from Zcash?
It feels borderline like you’re gaslighting my point with at face value, counter-factuals.
(Not to mention, that Bitcoin (and by association, Ethereum… re: any generic pro-crypto TV content) has in-fact benefitted from years worth of TV ads running in its favor)
Bitcoin, namely, and Ethereum have unique first mover brand and adoption advantages. In absolutely no sense, are we doing ourselves any favors in the year 2023 to be dreaming of a magical scenario where Zcash gets uptaken like Bitcoin and Ethereum already have been, by word of mouth and raw utility.
If the magic were going to happen for Zcash, it would’ve happened during our original heydays - the time of great Zcash prominence during the 2017-2018 bubble. Unfortunately, during that cycle nothing stuck. Now we’re in a borderline existential crisis, where smart, effective, efficient, hard-work and investment will be the only way out of it.
To me the problem with marketing is they tell people it’s money for day to day transactions and people very quickly realize they lose money. people decide quality based on how products actually work. imagine if tesla marketed its cars as getting a 500 mile range. people quickly find out its 300. that would result in damage to the brand. my view is marketing zec ultimately damages the brand because they infer zec is good for things in which it is not.
so marketing can get someone to try a product. but the quality of zec is so poor as a store of value for day to day transactions that they quickly lose the customers. so zec shoud either change its mission and market zec as private digital gold, and/or add privacy based stable coins to have real product for day to day transactions. slow transaction speeds, wallet issues, and lack of privacy by default losses customers as well, which in total undermines marketing. so my view is
a) zec=digital gold
b) add privacy stable coins
c) get a stable and reliable wallet and SDKs
d) improve transaction speeds
e) there is probably more…
then spend on marketing after these are all in place.
100% agree here. And this again is why great marketing needs to be about a relatable, uplifting story. Zcash should not be convincing people that ZEC are for day-to-day public (or private, if they’re technologically capable) digital cash transactions.
I’d suggest that the Zcash story is brought into consistency with reality. ZEC are a relatively scarce, digital asset like Bitcoin that have the potential to make long-term investors wealthy (privately, if they have the technology skills to shield their coins, and store them in self-custody).
That is a complex story to communicate through a 1-2 minute video, but as mentioned above:
If Zcash continues to sell its ZEC product as a day-to-day digital cash-like solution, we’ll continue to frustrate, disappoint, and scare away new merchants and users.
