“With new technology, product marketing has to be well-executed, everything from developing personas of your target customers to positioning the product in a way that they understand meets their needs”
says Tony Pham, Head of Marketing, at Kadena
Blockchain is now finding application in an increasing number of verticals. But it is still not all there. How do you plan to strategize the outreach for this new implementation?
Blockchain, like other innovative technologies, is going through an adoption lifecycle. At first, there has been a lot of excitement and some companies over-promised, resulting in disappointment. People may have heard the word Blockchain, but still not know what it actually means, which is understandable. At Kadena, we believe the entire market would benefit from common standards.
Push Customer Retention by Richer Customer Experience: The CMO strategy
Of course, contrasting Kadena’s Blockchain against competitors only gets us so far (although we do receive inbound leads from companies that have tried alternatives and then contact Kadena because they want a Blockchain that actually delivers). The key to our outreach is positioning our Blockchain as unique (and better) in a crowded market. To best describe our platform that provides interoperability between the Kadena public chain and the Kuro permissioned network using our Pact smart contract language, we’re defining the category of “hybrid Blockchain.”
As we work across verticals including finance, healthcare, and insurance, we are deploying an integrated marketing strategy using owned and earned channels to highlight real-world implementations. For example, we are working with Rymedi to validate the quality of medicinal products on our hybrid Blockchain.
How will you address the security question around public blockchain?
A big component of Blockchain security depends on the language used to write smart contracts and develop applications (also known as dApps). Public Blockchains such as Ethereum have had vulnerabilities exploited in the past, resulting in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars, as seen in the DAO hack and Parity Wallet multi-sig bug. Ethereum’s smart contract language, Solidity, is Turing complete. If Solidity were Turing incomplete, most of the attacks wouldn’t have been possible.
Also Read: How to Create a Globally Successful Content Marketing Strategies
Kadena’s smart contract language, Pact, is Turing incomplete. This helps to prevent recursion errors. For example, in Pact, any recursion that gets detected will cause immediate failure and terminate all running code. That significantly reduces potential attack vectors.
For additional assurance, the Kadena public Blockchain has been verified by independent experts to be both scalable and secure in bringing the first shared Proof of Work Layer 1 public Blockchain to the industry.
What is your single biggest challenge for marketing this product?
Not only is Kadena at the forefront of technology with Blockchain, but the company also stands apart in the industry by doing something that nobody else has done before — scaling a Proof of Work Blockchain using parallelized chains, which anyone can see is working in production.
A lot of education is required, which makes sense because what we’re doing is so new. With tutorials for writing Pact smart contracts and other resources, Kadena is committed to advancing adoption by making Blockchain more accessible for everyone. I’m excited that someone proficient at Excel can easily learn Pact.
You have earlier marketed the TrueUSD stablecoin. What learning from that experience has helped you in the marketing of this product (Kadena’s hybrid Blockchain)?
When I first joined the TrustToken team, there was a lot of doubt as to the purpose of stablecoins. During my experience launching and marketing the TrueUSD stablecoin, the market cap grew to over $150 million USD in less than one year.
I learned that reducing friction in the customer decision-making process is imperative. Especially with new technology, product marketing has to be well-executed, everything from developing personas of your target customers to positioning the product in a way that they understand meets their needs. One of the biggest responsibilities is being the unwavering voice of the customer(s).
Also Read : Intent Data Can Get More from Event Marketing
What are your top-ranked verticals for target customers? What state of readiness do you see in their adoption of your product?
Healthcare, with HIPPA and other compliance issues, is a vertical where we see Kadena’s hybrid Blockchain platform providing a lot of value. As we shared at the end of 2019, we’ll soon be tracking and validating the quality of medicinal products in collaboration with Rymedi. The partnership we announced with the $3 billion fund USCF underscores the promising opportunities for Blockchain adoption in finance. J.P. Morgan already has its own stablecoin. Since Kadena’s founders built J.P. Morgan’s first Blockchain, they have the required business and technical expertise. Tony Pham leads Kadena’s marketing, bringing expertise in branding, customer development, and product marketing to the team. Previously, he was Head of Marketing and Communications at TrustToken, where he launched and led marketing for the go-to-market and growth of the TrueUSD stablecoin (reaching over $200 million in market cap in less than 1 year).
Tony Pham began his career in Silicon Valley when he was recruited to Max Levchin’s Slide where he was the first product marketing hire, managing a team over four years through to an acquisition by Google. He has been an expert source to media such as Bloomberg, CoinDesk, CNN, and USA Today. Tony is a Fulbright Scholar.
