Brands and NFTs: The Girardian Angle

Buy the rumor, sell the news

I’ve previously written that NFTs are Girardian, meaning that they fulfill the very human need for realizing mimetic desire. NFTs allow us to express ourselves creatively, to affiliate ourselves with like-minded people, and to copy the behaviors of those with whom we’re enamored.

If you’ll forgive the somewhat esoteric aside before we get to the point of this post, Peter Thiel recognized that mimetic desire is an extraordinarily powerful human instinct, and that Mark Zuckerberg had perfectly captured it in Facebook. In an essay discussing the connection between Zuckerberg, Facebook, Thiel and Girard, Geoff Shullenberger writes:

According to Girard’s mimetic theory, humans choose objects of desire through contagious imitation: we desire things because others desire them, and we model our desires on others’ desires. As a result, desires converge on the same objects, and selves become rivals and doubles, struggling for the same sense of full being, which each subject suspects the other of possessing. The resulting conflicts cascade across societies because the mimetic structure of behavior also means that violence replicates itself rapidly. The entire community becomes mired in reciprocal aggression. The ancient solution to such a “mimetic crisis,” according to Girard, was sacrifice, which channeled collective violence into the murder of scapegoats, thus purging it, temporarily, from the community. While these cathartic acts of mob violence initially occurred spontaneously, as Girard argues in his book Violence and the Sacred, they later became codified in ritual, which reenacts collective violence in a controlled manner, and in myth, which recounts it in veiled forms. Religion, the sacred, and the state, for Girard, emerged out of this violent purgation of violence from the community. However, he argues, the modern era is characterized by a discrediting of the scapegoat mechanism, and therefore of sacrificial ritual, which creates a perennial problem of how to contain violence.

So what does this all have to do with brands? It’s fairly straightforward: brands operate in an increasingly competitive market, in which consumers’ time is limited. Brands have to do something to stand out. For some brands, that means garish Super Bowl ads, for others it means annoying ads on web sites, for yet others it means plastering their logo on Formula 1 cars.

In all instances, brands are trying to capture people’s attention. And the most valuable brands have legions of passionate fans who follow the brand as their forebears may have followed religious icons. Companies want to inculcate in their customers desire for their products. And customers want to affiliate with like-minded people: if all of your friends shop at Whole Foods and drive SUVs, you, too, likely shop at Whole Foods and drive an SUV.

And, so, the point of this post: some examples of brands which have used the NFT phenomenon to test out new marketing strategies to more firmly cement themselves in customers’ minds.

So let’s look at Coca-Cola. Here’s the OpenSea listing for Coca-Cola’s NFTs. One of the NFTs is presently valued at 500 eth, or around $1.6 million USD. Now, your initial reaction might be: who the hell is going to pay $1.6 million for a video of a shiny Coke-branded jacket?

And--that’s your prerogative. But the world is large, and contains billions of people. And clearly someone has shown themselves willing to spend seven digits on a Coca-Cola-branded NFT.

From Coca-Cola’s perspective, the advantage is clear: it gets publicity.

The owner can socialize the notion that he’s (I don’t know the owner’s gender) wealthy enough to spend seven digits on what looks to some people to be a trivial bauble.

So what’s the bottom line here? Why are NFTs such an important development if all they are being used for is to allow wealthy people to acquire branded computer files?

Well--that’s the thing. That’s not all NFTs are being used for. NFTs provide for the easy digital exchange of human creativity and culture. And, as with any other creative endeavor, some of the output will be crap and some of it will be sublime. Those who malign NFTs as they presently exist ignore their potential. And in a hyperscale crypto world where significant value quickly accrues to early adopters, betting against the power of mimetic desire may well be financially injurious.