So I thought was done writing about BAYC for the week after my juicy post yesterday…but it seems someone from their team reads my newsletter (I wish lol) because they just reset the bar again…
In the realm of Customer Service.
So before continuing, the key detail to know here with BAYC’s merch drop last month is that there were technical issues, and not everyone was happy about it.
IMO they just fixed that.
How might you ask?
(Yes, this is Hugh Hefner’s daughter)
PSkan - The Tropical Ape 🍌🏝 @PSkan3
Machi Big Brother @machibigbrother
This is why @yugalabs @BoredApeYC are the kings.
Franklin (46a🅿️es.eth) @ElectionDayMad1
Thank you @BoredApeYC for the free merch! 🙌🏾
Thank you .@BoredApeYC for the free merch 🤩 🦍 🦧
Did BAYC just make their customer service a growth loop? Sheeeeesh.
To be clear, it’s not like other brands haven’t done this before. There have been great examples of customer service that have gone viral but here’s some interesting points to consider:
This is done in one fell swoop, creating a groundswell of chatter in the NFT space. This is not applicable to everyone, but because BAYC has quarterly-ish merch drops. This is easier for them to execute.
Some of these folks were probably the ones that bashed the merch design or the technical issues during the drop last month. BAYC holders are not shy when criticizing, and they are just as passionate when highlighting great decisions from the team.
All these posts screenshot the same e-mail and message to the users that qualified.
This is a sample of the all the posts that gave props to BAYC, there are many more.
This almost makes me think it was coordinated, who knows lol. If it was, coordinated pretty damn well.
I’m not going to calculate if this business decision was right or wrong from a ROI perspective, but what I’m going to do is break down the primary and secondary effects of this decision. This effort probably cost BAYC at least 6 figures (maybe Coinbase fronted some of the cost since the technical issues stemmed from them?), and this is what they got in return:
A portion of the 750k total followers from the sample of these 7 accounts (Crystal Hefner carrying the team here lol) saw these posts. Gotta love that organic reach :)
140+ retweets from these 7 posts
Owning the conversation in NFT Twitter for a portion of the day. This isn’t a ‘in one ear, out the other’ moment or a fleeting meme. I mean, shit, I’m writing about it…
All the chatter on Discord, whether it was the BAYC Discord server itself, or all the other Discord servers. News in the NFT world travels veryyyyyy fast.
Continuation of building positive brand equity
Oh, by the way, the BAYC Twitter account and Discord server didn’t even mention what they did. Most brands would probably pat themselves on the back and announce what they did.
This team just let the community do the talking if they wanted to. BAYC focused on doing the right thing, not promoting that they did the right thing.
So when you think “WTF, why are these ape pictures worth $300k?!”, remember this is a brand, not a jpeg.
