How To… Mine Kinetic Currency

Whilst the world gets itself in a spin about cryptocurrencies, I want you to think about something much more tangible.  

It’s a currency with a value as old as trade, or marketing itself but it has never been more sought after or valuable than today. This is the value created when we make people move - the trade between physical action and a brand experience. This is what I like to call ‘kinetic currency’.

Kinetic currency is what is generated when people turn from being passive recipients of information, content or and experience to being active participants.

Take a simple example. My teenage daughter told me she wanted to go and see Stormzy, I handed over my credit card, and a straight-forward currency transaction occurred. But then, she and her friend then took their pre-show experience online, thereby leveraging a second, social currency as they posted on Instagram and set up a Whatsapp group. After weeks of anticipation, they went down to the Brixton Academy to exchange their ‘kinetic currency’; their energy, their time and their physical involvement in return for a fantastic live experience. They traded with the artist; their movement in return for an experience.

Stormzy. 

So why is this important now?

With the rise of digital and smartphones, the need for any of us to move has reduced dramatically. With Spotify, you don’t need to queue outside a record store to buy an album, neither do you need to go to the cinema when Netflix is in your living room, and thanks to Deliveroo, you don’t even need to leave the house to go to your favourite restaurant.

The same is true of how we, as marketers, are talking to consumers. Although digital marketing can reach millions, but it has no scarcity, no exclusivity and limited value to an individual.

But experiences are still valuable. In fact, physical marketing is more valuable than ever, as more people crave real-life interactions. Studies have shown that two-thirds of UK millennials prefer to spend money on experiences than on material things, giving rise to a growing ‘experience economy’ of which social media is a huge driver.

These experiences are more effective than advertising, in driving brand loyalty and long-term ROI. Bringing people together drives word-of-mouth too, which we know is one of the most powerful advertising mediums, because people tend to trust people they know over a piece of content they got served by an algorithm on Instagram.

The challenge we have faced is bringing these two worlds together, the effectiveness of  physical marketing, which has no scale, with digital marketing, which has scale but no scarcity.

The future is a combination of the two; taking the exclusivity of a physical experience and combining it with the scalability of digital content.

How do we do this?

This is where kinetic currency comes in.  The bottom line is a value exchange between the two participants: the customer gives their precious time and physical effort, getting exclusive digital content from the brand in return.

Consider the value of the kinetic currency generated with Pokémon Go. Its experience reached a market of millions, but it created exclusivity by creating content scarcity. To get involved, people had to move.

Pokémon Go.

At Landmrk, we created a platform for Shakira (at top) to tease out content in the lead-up to the release of her latest album. That campaign got fans out onto the streets via a mobile web platform across 99 countries, with over 800,000 people visiting the platform and spending 4,700 hours on the campaign. 

Through this kind of marketing, we begin to understand just how far a potential customer or music fan will physically go for a digital experience. By challenging people to become actively involved in campaigns to seek out content and digital experiences for themselves, in the real world, allows brands to develop a greater understanding of what it is that makes consumers tick.

If marketers understand the power of kinetic currency they can create global digital campaigns with the hard-hitting impact of physical activations. So how do we create kinetic currency?

·  Make the experience as simple as possible - if you are asking them to download an app make sure it has utility - ideally keep your experience on mobile web or within a social network

·  Make it personal - location and context marketing enable you to adapt your call to action to your audience. Ensure the value exchange is enough to motivate movement and to turn your customer into an advocate. What motivates a student to go to a coffee shop will be very different to what motivates a luxury car buyer to go to the dealership.

·  Make it shareable - the kinetic currency is being spent by the user but you need to make sure the transaction is witnessed by a larger audience. Make sure your reward is something people want to shout about.