Can brand marketing in the crypto world only rely on copying others' success?

Editor’s note: This article is about how the Eclipse team avoided the encryption industry and strengthened the brand by creating the Turbo mascot. They abandoned the “quick fix” strategy, valued the uniqueness and longevity of the brand, drew design ideas from anime-inspired design, and created differentiated effects with high-quality content, while refusing to financialize Turbo as a non-fungible token or token to maintain the long-term value of the brand. This approach underscores the team’s focus on marketing innovation and long-term impact.

The following is the original content (for ease of reading and understanding, the original content has been slightly reorganized):

As marketers, our job is not to be the most technical person in the company, but to be the best storyteller. But the reality is, the stories we tell are often dry and lack coherence.

My favorite story comes from the movie series. Good movies not only can be brilliant independently, but also can blend into each other to create an epic story. For example, the recent “Dune” series that I like, each movie itself is extremely attractive, but together they build a grand narrative. Plus, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and Javier Bardem, as well as Denis Villeneuve’s directorial skills - the visual effects, character development, music, sound design, and CG effects of the movie are simply perfect!

Of course, I’m not saying we need to create a movie-like masterpiece for the encryption company, but where is our narrative? Looking around, all we see are endless product integration announcements, podcasts, and various boring content, without any coherent story to connect them. We are obviously just making a fuss for no reason.

Telling a great story takes heart and a clear intent, yet too many of us take a ‘cast a wide net’ or ‘scattergun’ approach. This might work when trying to place paid advertising, but it’s a foolish strategy for brand building. Your marketing can’t just be a few blog posts and random internet memes, especially with a lack of a unified theme. We can and should do better.

Building a high-quality brand is like boiling a pot of water. When you put the kettle on the stove, it doesn’t immediately boil from room temperature (ordinary brands) to boiling (widely known). You need to keep heating (marketing) to gradually raise the temperature. If you consider factors such as altitude (lack of momentum in company development), the boiling speed may be slower. So, how do you make the water boil faster? Here, deliberate marketing is like a pinch of salt. If you invest enough thought and preparation in marketing communication and packaging, brand awareness will increase faster and last longer. You should always ask yourself, what role does this particular announcement play in my brand story?

To be honest, all encryption marketers have great room for improvement in this area, I think marketing leaders (including myself) perform poorly in the following two aspects: A. Too easily adjusting core information according to industry trends B. Too easily influenced by various feedback from CEOs and teams

Our industry generally has a collective “attention deficit”, and PA is often affected by the frequently changing trends driven by meme coins/trading (such as political themes, animal themes, specific chains, etc.). At the same time, the rational encryption community on Twitter is always attracted by mainstream narratives. In the past year, several major topics within the industry include:

Modular vs. Integrated

Application Chain Theory vs. Application-Specific Sorting

Solana vs. ETH坪

The problem is not that we are trying to make the project relevant to these discussions, it is wise to use hot topics to attract attention and guide it to ourselves. But our problem is that in order to cater to these narratives, we have excessively sacrificed the core consistency of the brand.

You can’t have all the answers in every industry debate, and not all topics can last. Trends and feedback are important, but brands should maintain consistency and steady development. It is appropriate to consider at the right time, but more attention should be paid to the long-term development of the brand.

Of course, high-quality feedback is important, but it is also important to know when to refuse. Everyone has the right to express their opinions, but not every opinion is equally important. For example, 0xLitquidity, our CEO, and I have had repeated discussions on market plans. When he told me that he wanted to see a specific type of dApps appear on Eclipse, I would ask for details, but ultimately respect his judgment because he has 10 years of experience and I trust his business acumen.

But when it comes to marketing, that’s my expertise. I have rejected Vijay’s marketing suggestions more than once because they did not align with the overall narrative of the Eclipse brand. Sometimes, I even insist on increasing the budget to drive certain key initiatives. This is not opposition, but rather my responsibility. I was hired to run our marketing engine, not to be a “yes man”.

Similarly, I also attach great importance to the team’s feedback, which often brings me inspiration. For example, much of the recent ‘ASS’ content we released came from the team’s creativity, not from me, and it has indeed helped us gain a lot of follow. However, I still frequently veto some of their suggestions because I am not only seeking short-term follow, but also taking responsibility for the long-term brand building. This kind of authorization is crucial for maintaining the consistency of the brand’s voice, and ultimately if the brand does not perform well, the responsibility lies with me, not the team.

I know these are very abstract, so I will now share in detail the creation and evolution process of our mascot TurboTheCow, in order to explain these concepts more clearly.

Many people ask whether Turbo should create its own mascot, and the simple answer is - probably not. To better explain the reasons, let’s first review the birth process of Turbo.

Before I joined, Eclipse’s core team had been discussing ‘Thicc Sequencers.’ But even after the team released a well-performing financing announcement, Eclipse still struggled to gain consistent market follow. At that time, Vijay contacted me, and we began to seriously discuss the possibility of my joining the company. On the day of my formal interview, I mentioned that the ‘intern trend’ was outdated. At that time, many projects were following the trend, creating intern accounts to increase interaction and attract more follow (Eclipse was also doing this at the time). However, the problem was that only a few teams could do it well, and it was becoming increasingly clear that the marketing team was just blindly following others’ success.

This is one of the biggest problems in this industry’s marketing strategy, the leadership is unwilling to take risks and unwilling to spend money because of a lack of faith. So when they see others doing well, they choose to imitate rather than innovate. The logic behind this is that they believe it is safer to invest resources in already proven successes, but the problem is that these strategies are successful because they are unique and carefully considered. Blind imitation usually doesn’t work. If you are not the first to do something, then you must do better than your predecessors in order to stand out.

I don’t want to fall into this trap, nor do I want our brand to become another example of a failed encryption company. Eclipse must be unique. Therefore, I have decided to completely abandon the intern account that the company previously tried to establish and try a different strategy: creating a mascot that can resonate with people even if they don’t know what Eclipse is.

At this time, our marketing team brought a Highland cow to an art gallery in New York City, triggering a frenzy of viral spread. Not only did internet celebrities outside the encryption community take photos and daily attendance Eclipse, this was my ‘enlightenment’ moment. Highland cow=thick aggregator, Highland cow=mainstream dissemination. In this way, we organically and ingeniously associated this animal with our brand. Thus, the Highland cow became our mascot, not imitating others, but creating brand stories in real time.

After determining the animal, it came to the design and naming stage. Prior to Eclipse, some of the promotional points revolved around ‘speed’, but speed itself is no longer attractive. TPS (Transactions Per Second) is now a thing of the past, and no one cares whether your blockchain is a bit faster than others (which is why we won’t make speed a core narrative of our brand). However, I don’t want to completely give up speed, after all, Eclipse is indeed very fast. During the conceptualization process, I realized that the best way to showcase our speed is not through direct promotion, but through indirect implications, and it’s best not to be associated with other encryption projects. So I started looking for inspiration outside the encryption circle.

Most people may not know that my inspiration actually comes from anime. When I found the website and animation designers, I asked them to incorporate two core inspirations into our brand visuals: Akira and Speed Racer. This inspiration, which has nothing to do with encryption, is what makes our brand and Turbo unique.

After multiple design adjustments, we finally confirmed the new logo, brand colors, website design, and the image of TURBO. A bold lemon green style with the hero character at the visual center. An adorable, 2D and 3D blended highland cattle, driving sports cars and motorcycles, symbolizing speed and also related to our ‘solid sorter’. The animation quality is also significantly higher than other mascots, making our design stand out. Finally, we chose ‘Turbo’ as the name of the mascot, adding the finishing touch.

However, with the excitement came a problem - everyone in Eclipse was eager to give suggestions, which is the classic ‘too many cooks’ problem. I soon realized that in order to maintain the momentum, I had to protect the creativity of Turbo. Despite my appreciation for the enthusiasm of team members, I declined some suggestions multiple times.

Examples are as follows:

The team hopes to immediately invest a large amount of money to increase the content output of TURBO. I am not sure if this is a reasonable expenditure until more data is collected.

Finally, I decided to invest in TUR, based on the following three data:

(1). Our content related to TUR posted on Twitter performs significantly better than other content;

(2). The community’s unprecedented support for Turbo has led to the creation of a large number of artworks, internet memes, and related content, which convinces me that we have indeed created something unique;

(3). Even those who have never followed Eclipse are now contacting the team because of Turbo.

B. Team members suggested using Fiverr to produce a large amount of Turbo content. I firmly rejected it. We are a lean team of less than 30 people, and our advantage lies in quality rather than quantity. Sacrificing quality for quantity would make Turbo lose its uniqueness and become indistinguishable from other mascots.

C. Team members want to financialize Turbo and create it as a Non-fungible Token or Memecoin. Absolutely impossible. We are building a permissionless ecosystem so that the developer community can try it out on their own, but the Eclipse core team will not launch Turbo’s Non-fungible Token or Memecoin. The reason is that if we invest in these and they perform poorly, it will burn our accumulated reputation and momentum. In addition, it will greatly distract the attention of our product/engineering team. Turbo is a brand asset with the potential to resonate more with ordinary users than Eclipse.

The above content is not meant to boast, but to demonstrate the Depth thinking behind us. Turbo has resonated with our audience and become one of our most successful marketing tools. So when you ask me whether we should create a mascot, it’s not a simple yes or no question.

The answer depends on whether you are willing to truly invest in creating a meaningful brand mascot. Simply drawing an animal at random will not have a real impact on your brand. Boiling water takes time, and I feel that many people hope to see it boil immediately.

「Original Text Link」