I genuinely believe the Hive Rally Car, along with much of the rest of the ValuePlan projects, is nonsense and an ill-thought-out, utterly wasteful expenditure of money. I'll come to ValuePlan and the DHF later, but just as the Hive Rally car begins again to pour thousands of dollars down the drain in preparation for the next rally, I thought it might be time to ask the question:
What is the branding actually trying to sell?
Firstly, pretend you've never heard of Hive before. You're a rally fan standing at the side of the road watching the cars go by, or you're at home, watching the highlights. We'll make a huge and unlikely assumption that the TV highlights are actually going to show the WRC3 cars coming through at the end of the stage, but no matter.
With that in mind, let's have a closer look at the car itself and the Hive branding.
What's immediately drawing your eye when you look at this photo?
We can see the word 'HIVE' on the bonnet and a logo above it, but the normal eyeline would surely notice the more prominent words 'WRC-FANSHOP.COM' on the windscreen sun-stripe, above which you can just about make out Hive.10....or is it HIVE.IO ? Along the top of the bumper, we have 'WEB3 IS HIVE.10'
After reading that tagline, I'll bet Saatchi and Saatchi are shitting themselves.
Your interest is (again, unlikely) piqued. What's Hive? So you Google.
And...
Hang on. You're based in Thailand. What about a UK-based search account?
No problem. This is a search on my UK Microsoft account...
Nothing again. In fact, it wasn't until I reached page 9 that I came across hive.io.
Of course, it does say hive.io on the rally car. What if I simply type that into my search bar? Will the wonders of what Hive is suddenly become apparent?
Yes, they do, with this scintillating sub-menu of jargon.
"But what does Hive do and why do I need it?" they ask themselves. Do the rally fans out there keep going, or do they get back to their rally?
But let's assume they continue and go to the website.
Which it is, but unless the above search process, at impossible odds, has been undertaken by a person with an interest and understanding of Blockchains and Web3, here's where the search will most definitely end.
So I ask. What are your marketing goals? Who and where is your defined audience? What exactly are you selling?
Seriously, who at Hive asked these questions and created the car branding?
I could go on, but I think you understand the point I'm trying to make.
I'll go a little further. Valueplan and the whole voting system for the DHF is a misrepresentation.
Valueplan. Firstly, for creating a single basket for multiple and often diverse projects, instead of allowing people to vote for individual projects. And secondly, for providing zero accountability, auditing or performing any best practices. After many calls by the Hive community for improvement and promises of more transparency, nothing has changed.
The DHF voting system itself is also contrived due to proxy voting and the ability for the largest stakeholders to achieve their desired result. Yes, I know it's a decentralised PoS system, but it needs to be fairer and to allow an individual's votes to be weighted by more than just the size of their stake. Add in a user's length of membership, their engagement, their reputation, and their authenticity.
Hive is driven by developers. Our developers are brilliant coders. They are visionaries who have created this amazing platform and continue to improve and develop it. This is what developers and coders do. This is what they excel in. They are developers, not marketers. Sadly, they appear not to realise this and continue to push a marketing agenda as if it's a little more than a footnote.
If you have a rail network and want people to ride on the trains. The rail network advertises the trains. How comfortable and fast they are, how they will improve your journeys. They focus on the direct benefits to the users. People will be convinced to use your wonderful railway network because of the trains, not because of the infrastructure they run on. They won't care how shiny and straight your tracks are.
If you need investment in the infrastructure, investors will look at the users, the people riding the trains and see how much they love it and how many more people would use them if they invested in the infrastructure. Would you tout your wonderful investment opportunity to random people who liked rally cars? Of course not.
So why are we talking about onboarded users when your marketing is geared to selling the blockchain itself, and as such, the corporate market? It makes no sense at all.
Back to rally cars
Side view isn't much better. 'Crypto without compromises' Indeed!
So what should we be doing? Continuing with the rally car, as that's money spent that isn't ever coming back, I'd love to see a full rebrand. Something like this...
Identify the target market and adapt the advertising accordingly.
