What is Blockchain Marketing?
Fundementally, blockchain is considered an institutional technology rather than a general-purpose technology as it is a distributed ledger technology that possibly excludes the existing sets of institutions—markets, hierarchies, relational contracting—and offers a new model of economic coordination and governance, including ledger entry and private keys for property rights, public keys and decentralized networks for exchange mechanisms, cryptocurrencies/CBDC for fiat currencies, code for law, and initial coin offerings for alternative finance (Tan and Salo, 2023). Through interview data, our findings uncover three unique aspects of blockchain that enable trust in exchange vs. a traditional exchange: (1) trust in exchange actors: mathematics and cryptography vs. human guardians within institutions, (2) trust in exchange actions: information transparency enabling tamperproof and immutable data vs. information asymmetry, and (3) trust in exchange assets: digital vs. manual escrows for verifying ownership of valuable goods (Tan and Saraniemi, 2023). For these reasons, blockchain marketing should not be considered merely a part of digital marketing, but rather as a new way to shift marketing activities into a more decentralized manner (Tan et al., 2023). This includes employing blockchain in decentralized advertising, fostering customer-brand relationships among stakeholders, addressing marketing issues related to designing decentralized blockchain ecosystems, and adopting decentralized tokenized assets as part of marketing transactions (Tan et al., 2024). As such, blockchain marketing will lead to new business models that involve polycentric governance, sustainable digitalization, and physical-virtual cooperative organizations (Sze et al., 2024). Thus, it is essential to investigate a novel concept called “decentralized trust”.
How Do We Conduct Research on Decentralized Trust?
Apart from engineering and IT research that investigates the technical aspects of decentralization, a robust theoretical foundation for decentralized trust has not yet been conceptualized in social-psychology, management, and business studies (Tan et al., 2023). Therefore, I focus on trust theory as my foundational theoretical framework. My research investigates the concept of decentralized trust which is crucial for the emerging era of the metaverse and Web 4.0, where trust distribution shifts away from centralized authorities to a diverse array of stakeholders managing digital asset transactions.
Our project targets strategic corporate biodiversity (SCB) due to the critical and urgent need to address biodiversity loss, which has escalated dramatically over the past century with more than 99 percent of all species that have ever lived now extinct, largely due to human-driven resource extraction and cultivation. SCB refers to the management and preservation of biological diversity by businesses in ways that align with their strategic goals.
The exploration of this decentralized trust concept demands the development of real-life online community projects and empirical testing in digital environments. Allowing direct observation and analysis of decentralized trust dynamics as they naturally occur, providing insights that are critical for understanding and shaping the future of digital economic systems. We will introduce the concept of blockchain to enable decentralized trust in SCB among Fortune 500 companies in Europe (EU500), with three objectives:
- We will establish decentralized trust mechanisms within the existing EU500’s sustainability reporting of SCB.
- We will develop digital credentials to measure decentralized trust in EU500’s SCB that involves multistakeholder.
- We will implement blockchain-enabled decentralized trust governance in SCB, enabling a novel system of trust using a polycentric approach and the characteristics of blockchain technology.
These objectives will encode distributed trust networks to establish the provenance and relevance of EU500’s SCB within the global biodiversity framework. In a nutshell, our project aims to develop a theoretical framework and measurement tools for decentralized trust in the context of SCB. This approach will establish a co-determined, distributed trust network, enabling effective collaboration among researchers, environmentalists, firms, and communities. Utilizing a bottom-up approach, the network will implement blockchain-enabled decentralized trust governance. In this system, trust is built and maintained through the collective verification of data and transactions by all network members, reducing the reliance on central intermediaries and potentially lowering the risks of corruption, bias, or failure associated with centralized control.
The decentralized trust concept challenges and extends traditional theories of trust and market coordination, illuminating how decentralized technologies reshape business models and market structures. Further, this concept will bridge gaps between cross-disciplinary research and policy makers, ensuring its evolution continues to impact scholarly discourse and practical strategies, thereby enhancing global market sustainability and efficacy. The success of our project will contribute to the pseudonymous economy (Tan & Salo, 2023) and decentralized identity (Tan & Saraniemi, 2023), while also illuminating the path toward a decentralized society (Weyl et al., 2022).
My Self-Reflection
Similar to many other scholars, I often face financial constraints when conducting research. However, I would like to express my appreciation for the support provided by the Liikesivistysrahasto, especially in the controversial fields of blockchain, decentralization, and, to a lesser extent, cryptocurrency. Over the years, my research topic has led to numerous rejections. Without the funding from the Liikesivistysrahasto, I might have switched to a more commonly accepted marketing topic, such as AI marketing, and missed the opportunity to work at prestigious institutions like Harvard and Cambridge.
This journey has also transformed my perspective on the purpose of research. It’s about more than just producing a high volume of publications, such as a high output of articles and a focus on citations, or concentrating solely on top journals in our field. It has inspired me to consider the broader societal and real business implications of my work.
Of course, it is naive to proclaim that “We Are Going to Change the World,” but at least we are sincerely conducting our research with this vision and progressively moving in this direction. Feel free to explore the latest developments in our research at DeTrustLab.org!
The grant support by Liikesivistysrahasto has been instrumental in revolutionizing my research journey in blockchain marketing and decentralized trust. It included a pivotal research visit to Harvard University at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (Weatherhead Center, 2024), sponsored by Professor Frank Dobbin, and resulted in top publications in Financial Times-ranked journals on blockchain marketing (Tan and Saraniemi, 2023) and the blockchain-based sharing economy (Tan and Salo, 2023). Additionally, I am excited about my upcoming visit to Cambridge Judge Business School from January to June 2026. This opportunity, sponsored by Professor Jaideep Prabhu, will allow me to focus on decentralized trust research.
Author: Teck Ming (Terence) Tan
Positions: Associate Professor in Marketing; Oulu Business School; Adjunct Professor at University of Helsinki
Oulu Researcher Website: https://www.oulu.fi/en/researchers/teck-ming-terence-tan
Article image credit: Bethany Versoy
References:
Tan, T. M., & Saraniemi, S. (2023). Trust in blockchain-enabled exchanges: Future directions in blockchain marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 51(4), 914-939.
Tan, T. M., & Salo, J. (2023). Ethical marketing in the blockchain-based sharing economy: Theoretical integration and guiding insights. Journal of Business Ethics, 183(4), 1113-1140.
Tan, G. W. H., Aw, E. C. X., Cham, T. H., Ooi, K. B., Dwivedi, Y. K., Alalwan, A. A., … & Tan, T. M. (2023). Metaverse in marketing and logistics: the state of the art and the path forward. Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, 35(12), 2932-2946.
Tan, T. M., Salo, J., Alejandro, T. G. B., Tan, G. W. H., Ooi, K. B., & Dwivedi, Y. K. (2024). Guest editorial: A blockchain-based approach to marketing in the sharing economy. Journal of Business Research, 177, 114639.
Sze, L. B., Salo, J., & Tan, T. M. (2024). Sustainable innovation in the metaverse: Blockchain’s role in new business models. Digital Business, 4(2), 100086.
Weatherhead Center. (2024). 2023-2024 annual report of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Retrieved from https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/wcfia/files/weatherhead-annualreport23-24-highres.pdf
Weyl, E. G., Ohlhaver, P., & Buterin, V. (2022). Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul. Available at SSRN https://ssrn.com/abstract=4105763.