Novel x Kat Cole
Kat Cole is the President and COO of Athletic Greens, the innovative wellness company behind AG1, your source for comprehensive nutrition and gut health support in one daily drink.
Previously, Kat served as President at Focus Brands, where she accumulated years of expertise in scaling global brands and franchise organizations. We sat down with Kat to delve into:
Brand entry points into web3 that won’t disrupt existing growth
Her tactical playbook for leveraging NFTs at Athletic Greens
The value drivers of web3 for both brands and customers
“NFTs and web3 should be exhilarating for eCom merchants. At a minimum, we’re able to modernize pre-existing behaviors through a new digital layer.”
The Future of web3 is Now
As someone who’s built global brands for years, Kat believes the contemporary intersection of existing eCommerce and web3 lends immediate benefits to both customers and brands.
On the consumer end:
web3 provides opportunities for digital engagement, tokenization, brand ownership, and community-based brand involvement.
The prospect of owning a brand-created NFT opens the door for accumulating value and utility through digital assets over time.
Meanwhile, on the merchant end:
This modernization of loyalty, membership, and rewards programs naturally builds on the pre-existing infrastructure of Web 2.0.
Rewarding customer loyalty, frequency of use, and time spent as a brand user thus easily converts into a web3-style, NFT-based structure.
“When there is true convenience and utility, it may surprise people just how quickly tech adoption jumps generations, psychographics, and need states.”
The Inevitability of NFT-Gated Experiences
In this context, an NFT is a digital commemoration of the brand-buyer relationship. It presents an opportunity for a brand to return value to the user both immediately and down the line.
This digital layer is not only a chance for the customer to gain something worthwhile; it grants the brand autonomy to parcel out that worth at their own discretion.
With Web 2.0, it was challenging to unify post-purchase consumer experiences like user info, community, special deals, beta testing opportunities, and product or CX feedback.
With web3, once your users are equipped with their wallets and your tokens, NFT-gated experiences and communities will be inevitable and seamless to construct.
The Nexus of Commerce and NFTs
Kat believes that, at a minimum, these web3-driven eCom advancements comprise a digital layer that’s renewing an already existent type of brand-buyer behavior.
On a far larger scale, they’re introducing functions of the community and creator ownership economies to digital commerce.
This integrates many more ways to engage with communities around an interest, a moment, or a brand, plus more junctures to help customers participate in value generation.
State of Affairs: web3 is Already Here
She also points out that the question isn't if NFT eCom integration is feasible. It's how far along that integration is and what's left to come.
Web3 elements are already here and being implemented. So how will your brand participate without derailing your existing growth plans?
Kat advises brand teams to look inward with the following questions:
Do I understand the potential applications of the web3 economy to my brand?
How much time and energy would scaling a web3 initiative or structure take?
Does my business have enough resources (time, labor, capital) to execute well?
In other words, you’ll need to be able to simultaneously:
Take account of your brand’s assets in order to assess the scope of your capabilities. Awareness of your strengths will allow for the most effective scale.
Have caution around new buzzworthy tech, but not to the point of inaction.
Implementing the Internet of the Future
For any brand that’s on the fence about taking a gamble on web3 before it becomes the industry norm, Kat presents three reasons to set the trend rather than wait to follow it:
Outpace Your Competitors — If you don’t scale for web3, your competition will. Can your brand afford that loss?
LTV — web3 creates potential for sizable retention and LTV boosts by providing something unique and entirely unexpected for your existing customers.
Unique Acquisitions — It also creates a venue for recruitment. Gain access to crossover audiences that may have wallets but no prior exposure to your brand.
“It would be myopic to only view the industry from where we are now. You’ve got to appreciate the web3 space, understand it’s messy, and love it anyway.”
Why Athletic Greens is Hopping On Board
Kat outlines some action items (tested and validated in her own work at Athletic Greens) for your brand to follow and scale with respect to web3 and NFTs.
A Dynamic Digital Layer
If your brand hosts any type of event, mint and issue an NFT. This bestows a sort of commemoration of your customer’s presence.
The NFT is also a dynamic digital layer that only takes on the value you assign it. This grants you plenty of time to scale further before adding any monetary or related reward value.
Acting on Her Advice: Athletic Greens
Your brand will also need to acquire an NFT wallet and an ENS address. These allow you to:
Support NFT projects that are relevant to your brand
Confer special rewards to your token-holding loyalty members
Offer your brand as a partner or a perk for another brand’s project
Kat has already implemented these suggestions at Athletic Greens, seeing as NFTs and similar web3 elements are an explicit component of the company's growth roadmap.
Athletic Greens was already an early mover in the independent creator economy — and they plan to make the bridge to web3 from this established sphere.
She made sure the brand obtained an ENS within a week of starting her role. So far, they’ve bought and supported projects around health, wellness, greenness, and design.
As Kat explains, these adaptations are simple when approached through a platform like Novel.
Balance Existing Growth with Innovation
To scale this new economy while not disrupting ongoing growth efforts, Athletic Greens struck a balance by educating their teams on web3, such as by:
Creating a Slack channel for relevant educational resources
Or instructing teams to think through applying their work to these new digital layers
Ultimately, Athletic Greens intends to reward their long-time, existing subscribers by building out projects around web3-powered bonuses.
They also see a profitable future in investing in creators within the expansive web3 network.
Above all, Kat affirms the role of Novel’s software for the Shopify platform in streamlining integrations of these web3 developments into existing Web 2.0 presences.
“Building this network of consumer opportunities is a bit too complex for Web 2.0. Novel allows us to smoothly synthesize all these capabilities via web3.”
