Headless Brands and Nouns
The canonical writing on headless brands is the article of that topic: Headless Brands
The canonical examples of a headless brand project is Nouns.
However, there's still room to apply these concepts in the real world applying concepts from normie brand management principles.
A critical part of the article, when talking about the OG headless brand, Bitcoin, drives the rest of this discusion:
In the absence of structured brand management, these [protocol] design decisions have become well-known tenets of Bitcoin's brand. The immutability of these core protocol mechanisms has allowed for many narratives to emerge on top.
The protocol creates the brand platform on which many narratives emerged.
As the article discussed, these narratives expand the overall brand of Bitcoin:
To me, starting first with the Nouns protocol characteristics should be the platform.
On top of this platform can be multiple narratives, which can be driven by its decentralized participants.
What are the known characteristics?
- No pre-mine: the contracts issue NFTs to successful builders
- Consistent time: in the same way Blockchains 'tick tock next block' and it's halvening cycle every X blocks introduced a consistent Schelling point, so does the "noun o'clock" concept
- No rare attributes: this would fall under broader "fairness" of the pre-mine; unlike many other NFTs which enshrined rarity into certain attributes, the selection of a given attribute is random.
- No IP restrictions: the Nouns were released without IP restrictions under the CC0 creative commons license.
- Treasury funding: all the funds for purchase of a given Noun goes to the Treasury via a smart contract. There are no humans who interfere with the flow of funds into the Treasury.
- Nouns selection: at each noun o'clock, nouners can vote for the next noun which are generated based upon the blocks (describe this better) of the prior noun.
At this point, it would be possible to generalize the "principles" each of these exhibit and perhaps find buckets.
For example, "Fairness" could be applied to the lack of pre-mine, the lack of embedded rarity.
"Participatory" could be assigned to the benefit of allowing Nouners help select the best Noun, rather than allowing it to be just randomly created by the protcool.
However, I think there are other "off-chain" attributes which are also important to the brand.
For example, the governance process which allows Nouners to vote on how to spend the Treasury invites participation.
The use of "Noggles" -- the familiar glasses each Noun wears --