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đȘ Ethereum needs simplified marketing too
Every product needs to be sold

âThere are three creativities: creativity in technology, in product planning, and in marketing. To have any one of these without the others is self-defeating in business.â
â Akio Morita

Ethereum needs simplified marketing too
The TR-55 transistor radio, the first product sold under the Sony brand, was a technical success â released in 1955, it marked a leap in miniaturization, solid-state design and made-in-Japan innovation.
It wasnât much of a seller, however, and Sonyâs co-founder, Akio Morita, knew why. It needed a better marketing pitch.
So for its next product, Morita demanded that Sonyâs engineers develop a gadget that he was sure would get peopleâs attention: a âpocketableâ transistor radio.
By 1957, Sony had developed the worldâs smallest radio, the TR-63 â a miracle of miniaturized components and clever engineering.
But it was a little too big to fit in a shirt pocket, which was Moritaâs goal: âWe liked the idea of a salesman being able to demonstrate how simple it would be to drop it into a shirt pocket,â he explained in his autobiography, Made in Japan.
Instead of sending the engineers back to the drawing board, however, Morita solved his design problem with a marketing trick: âWe had some shirts made for our salesmen with slightly larger than normal pockets, just big enough to slip the radio into.â
It worked better than even Morita could have imagined.
Not only did the TR-63 become an international hit that made Sony synonymous with innovation and high-quality products â it also kickstarted a revolution in global consumer electronics that would change the worldâs perception of Japan.
Morita would go on to become â in the assessment of John Nathan, author of Sony: A Private Life â âprobably the greatest marketer of the 20th century, right up there with Steve Jobs.â
If that sounds like hyperbole, consider that Sony â a Japanese company â was rated the number one brand in America from 1999 to 2006.
It was such a significant accomplishment that when Morita died in 1999 at the age of 78, he was hailed as âthe engine that pulled the Japanese economy.â
He wasn't born a marketer, however â he started out as a kid who liked to tinker with electronics. He went on to become a physicist working for the Navy, and then co-founded Sony as an engineer.
Neither he nor his co-founder Masaru Ibuka had any notion of âmerchandising or salesmanshipâ when they started Sony.
âIt never occurred to Ibuka or me that there was any need for this,â Morita explained in his autobiography. âIbuka believed strongly that all we had to do was make good products and the orders would come. So did I. We both had a lesson to learn.â
Both founders assumed that âin making a unique product, we would surely make a fortune.â
But when they made their first unique product â a ground-breaking, magnetic-tape recording device â they didnât even make their investment back: âEverybody liked it, but nobody wanted to buy it.â
Thatâs when Morita learned the value of marketing: âHaving unique technology and being able to make unique products are not enough to keep a business going,â he realized. âYou have to sell the productsâ too.
He also realized heâd have to do the selling himself: âI was struck with the realization that I was going to have to be the merchandiser of our small company.â
This may be a universal truth of business: Every product, no matter how good, needs to be sold.
Blockchains, included.
Aim high
In his latest blog post, Simplifying the L1, Vitalik explains what Ethereum is aiming for â âto be the world ledger: the platform that stores civilization's assets and records, the base layer for finance, governance, high-value data authentication, and moreâ â and how to achieve it: âThis requires two things: scalability and resilience.â
Well, three things, probably: Morita would tell him that simplifying Ethereum requires marketing, too.
Ethereumâs decentralized and unofficial messaging has done a poor job of explaining what the worldâs first smart-contract blockchain is, why it matters, or why anyone might want to use it.
Fortunately, Vitalik may have inadvertently fixed Ethereumâs messaging, too. âWorld ledgerâ is an excellent elevator pitch!
Using Bitcoin as a model, Vitalikâs new priority for Ethereum is technical simplicity: âOne of the best things about Bitcoin is how beautifully simple the protocol is.â
Heâs referring to Bitcoinâs code, which is simple enough that âeven a smart high school student is capable of fully wrapping their head around and understandingâ it.
(Note: Iâve looked at the code myself and, wellâŠremind me never to match wits with a smart high school student.)
But Vitalik could equally have been referring to Bitcoinâs pitch to investors, which is beautifully simple, too: Everyone can immediately comprehend the appeal of âdigital gold.â
âWorld ledgerâ may not be quite as intuitive as that, but itâs a major improvement on Ethereumâs previous attempts at branding: âWorld computer,â âultra-sound money,â and âthe app store of cryptoâ all required a good deal of explaining.
The explanation of âworld ledger,â by contrast, seems far simpler: a decentralized platform âthat stores civilization's assets and records.â
Being simpler should give it a better chance to stick.
Simplifying any aspect of Ethereum will not be easy, however, as Vitalik warns: âExplicitly valuing simplicity requires some cultural change.â
But that change may already be underway â thereâs a growing consensus that Ethereumâs development should be âreprioritizedâ in favor of the base layer (rather than deliberately pushing transactions to layer-2 blockchains).
Just as importantly, thereâs a growing recognition that Ethereumâs marketing needs to be reprioritized, too.
For example, Tomasz Stanczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, has acknowledged that marketing is part of whatâs needed to rebuild Ethereumâs âsocial layer.â
âOn the marketing side, I think we donât want to create a brand name or advertising style of marketing,â Stanczak told Bankless on a podcast this morning, âbut better communication and clarity is also part of marketing.â
Better communication and clarity would fit Moritaâs definition of marketing, too â marketing, he explained, is about showing people âthe real value of what you are selling.â
The good news for Ethereum is that the value itâs selling can be a little aspirational â like Sonyâs pocketable radio that didnât quite fit into a pocket.
Similarly, Ethereum isnât quite the worldâs ledger just yet â but that sounds like a good thing to aspire to.
â Byron Gilliam
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