Temperature Check: Rebrand Bancor as a part of v3's marketing efforts

This proposal is expected to appear on Snapshot for voting on 2021-10-31T13:00:00Z . Make sure to stake your vBNT for voting before this date and time to participate in the DAO decision.

Proposal: Heat check - Rebrand Bancor as a part of v3’s marketing efforts

Vote FOR: Supports follow-on individual proposals that will address a possible new name, logo, website domains, imagery, and other branding
Vote AGAINST: Do not support any follow-up proposals to address the issues stated

TL;DR

  • Despite Bancor being a trailblazer in the decentralized application domain, Bancor’s user sentiment and market awareness greatly trails other similar protocols
  • Bancor continues to have a poor reputation in the crypto space
  • Bancor has poor market awareness
  • Bancor has an ambiguous logo
  • Bancor is not a common word, and is hard to share with others
  • Bancor is not memeable
  • Brainstorm some possible alternatives

Despite Bancor being a trailblazer in the decentralized application domain, Bancor’s user sentiment and market awareness greatly trails other similar protocols. This is especially disappointing given Bancor’s unique value proposition, unique and novel features, and technically superior product. The DAO understands that marketing effects will ramp up around the v3 release, but this proposal seeks to inquire from the community if greater change to the Bancor brand is desired.

A vote FOR does not mean we vote to change the name or various branding aspects unconditionally, but rather follow-on individual proposals will be made at a later time to further refine what the DAO desires.


Bancor continues to have a poor reputation relative to other projects in the crypto space:

While no user surveys have been completed as part of this proposal, it is no great secret that many in the crypto community outside of BNT holders do not see Bancor in a positive light. Much of this negative sentiment may stem from the 2017 ICO, when the token first went for sale (and many saw this as a quick money grab, especially after the token price dumped later on). Despite Bancor’s initial DEX product being quite novel and revolutionary in the blockchain space, it did not see great consumer adoption (this is more likely due to the nascent nature of DeFi at the time). Many BNT holders felt like they had made a very poor investment, and despite Bancor’s best efforts since then, it is hard to shake such a negative sentiment.

Searching for Bancor on google provides some limited info, but apart from that most of the news articles you will find have negative sentiment:


Bancor has poor market awareness:

Bancor, relative to other DEX products, is not well known.

A simple google search backs this up: most of the products mentioned are uniswap, sushiswap or the like:

This is backed up by on-chain data, which shows that Bancor is more or less not a well known product to trade on.


Bancor has an ambiguous logo:

This post clearly illustrates the issue. If after 4 years, users are still unsure what the logo is or stands for, it is too ambiguous to be a good logo.


Bancor is not a common word, and is hard to share with others:

This conversation has played out more than once when I try to tell others about Bancor:
“It’s called Bancor, maybe check it out.”
“Banker”?
“No, ‘Bank-or’ !”
“Bang core”?
"No, “B-A-N-C-O-R!”
“Oh, ok, I’ll try and find that later.”

Narrator: They won’t.

Bancor is not a common word in the English language. From the time of the Bretton Woods conference until the 2017 ICO it was not used much. It makes sense that its not in common vernacular. It is somewhat hard to pronounce and as such is not easy to share with others. This point is related to the next one -


Bancor branding is not memeable:

Memes are how crypto twitter shares ideas, and the current Bancor branding* is not easily memeable.

The word Bancor itself is not easily memeable. The logo and brand imagery are mostly* bland and boring.
Comparing to other successfully branded projects, like Uniswap, Sushiswap, Trader/Banker Joe, Olympus (3, 3), etc., Bancor is way behind.

*Bancor Vortex messaging and branding was memeable and spread well, and had a high impression rate


Brainstorm some possible alternatives:

Naming:
B
image
It’s simple, easy to meme, (B), I staked on B, etc.
http://b.finance

BancorSwap


This has been tried before but did not stick well, its also not that easy to meme

Banc
It’s simple, easier to meme, similar to “Bank” which provides some similar services, “I staked on (Banc)”, etc.
http://banc.or


So how do we fix it? I don’t know - I’m not a professional marketer. This post merely seeks to inquire if the community agrees that Bancor has a branding and awareness problem. I hope that this post can help start a greater discussion around this area and build some ideas together.

5 Likes

I like the idea but worry about timing (is there enough time and can this sort of thing slow down everything going on in preparation for v3?)

I like the idea of decoupling the swap site a bit from Bancor… have it be something that is recognized as the best swap interface… brand, market, promote it heavily to attract trade volume… give it a flashy log, a fun name, and the best UI, including super easy URL (e.g. oneSwap.io)

We can also keep the current bancor site and have bancor styling remain there with v3…
(the other site is to re-launch swap and have it’s freshness be part of its appeal)

“Powered by Bancor”…

3 Likes

Definitely agree with this point of view.
The Bancor name is synonymous with the failed ICO generation of the 2017 bull run.
A rebrand can help us abandon that past and join the party of the current generation so to speak.

We don’t need perse a food name or something stupid as that rainbow-colored Uniswap.
But something catchier like B or Banc would make our brand a lot easier to understand.
We can still be that professional project with a serious tone and be like the modern AMM.

2 Likes

Very detailed feedback.

Few pointers that might help balance the work/time needed to get anything out the door:

  1. Search results - negative sentiment

Bancor has the ability to initiate SEO work which will be designed to highlight the positive values, innovations and other positive treats. This work can create (over some time) enough depth of search results which will hide the historical negative ones.

  1. Search results - overall visibility

Same as above. With the right amount of SEO, this can also change. However, it is difficult to do proper SEO when the search volume for crypto related terms is very low.

The search you have pointed out has 0 known searches over the last 12 months.

  1. Platform for Trading

Current Bancor direction is to bring in the LPs and HODLers. That is simply because Bancor value proposition is strongest with this audience.

The fruits of this approach brought several projects to move their rebalancing activities to Bancor.

  1. Bancor logo and wordmark

Many brands started with a word that had no meaning and turned it into a common phrase. Not to say this is always good, but it is not uncommon.


To sum it up, great ideas and suggestions.
Perhaps some fine tuning can make it more accessible and easier to deliver within the given timeframe to create the best impact for Bancor v3 launch

2 Likes

I don’t know if Rebranding is what the project needs. But maybe it does!

I never knew that the logo was actually the letter ‘B’ until recently. I always thought that It was meant to be building blocks of some sort and I think that having a logo that actually signifies building blocks will have a stronger appeal in our space.

Some of the core DeFi primitives are open source, interoperability, and composability. The protocols in our space that have adapted this philosophy are then capable of integrating together and at the same time being used as base layers for other protocols that sit on top. This has led to the term DeFi Legos or DeFi building blocks which leads to network effects as others start to integrate with your protocol. Having a logo that represents this philosophy in my opinion will have a much better appeal and will better represent what we stand for.

I do agree that the branding of ‘Bancor’ does not inspire any excitement among many (especially with the younger crowd) and I think that it has more of a corporate appeal (at least in my opinion, many see it as such and I don’t think I am alone in that). This is to a great disadvantage for us since that’s the total opposite of what we are trying to be; a decentralized permissionless protocol that’s governed by a DAO (in great opposition to what a corporation is).

I am hugely in favor of shortening ‘Bancor’ to ‘Banc’ since it lends itself well to being creative with the word:

  • bancless
  • bancpack
  • cryptobanc
  • bancpool
  • bancmore

the possibilities are endless. With ‘banc’ as a name, It will still allow ourselves to be called “bancorians” (a name that has become very dear to many of us) as a homage to our roots.

1 Like

Personally, I don’t think that branding is what’s holding Bancor back when compared to its closest competitors. It’s the fees. Having a snappy name or logo does not change the fact unless you are investing 20K+, fees will consume a significant portion of your investment entering, exiting, or re-staking within the protocol. I fully understand that in V3 these concerns should be addressed.
In addition, in my opinion a pre-mature rebrand can backfire, appearing as if you are covering up for something, or attempting to distract. Not all re-brands end up with favorable outcomes…e.g. Google’s re-brand as Alphabet or Facebook’s re-brand as “Meta” (I guess we’ll see about this one).
Its better to acknowledge prior controversies, showing that as a company you have progressed and evolved, while embracing the fact that you were the first AMM. It communicates evolution rather than deception.
I personally think that if funds are to be expended, that better public relations is a way to start (after, or at least when there is a published estimated target date for V3).

1 Like

I don’t disagree and since this is a temperature check proposal then it will most likely not be actionable unless there is a follow-up proposal that seeks to actually change the logo or the name or both. With that said, I don’t think it is wise for us to undertake this at the moment given the focus on Bancor V3 and not wanting to distract away from those efforts. If the DAO wishes this to happen then it can probably come after and might require some community calls to get feedback from community members.

It might be good for us to do one of those sentiment checks to see what regular people think of “bancor” as a name as compared to other options (whatever we come up with). That should at least provide some guidance to the community on whether this is a good idea. I am of the opinion that the Bancor name has more of a corporate appeal and that puts us at a disadvantage given that DeFi is trying to disrupt the legacy financial system.

@DarkKnight,

I wonder if we should give people more time to consider this proposal and provide feedback before going on snapshot? Maybe another week or so?

1 Like

Something along the lines of being a “Decentralized Bank” would be cool. I would say something like De-Bank would be perfect but thats obviously already the name of a popular portfolio manager. I do think we should shift away from the idea of a DEX to a DEB (decentralized bank) since the term DEX or Swap minimizes the actual uses of bancor. Bancor is not a place where you just come to swap it’s a place where you can keep your long term crypto savings.

1 Like

How about Wancor?

Is good meme while also retaining underlying brand integrity/reputation.

The current brand feels quite bland, and community is everything in DeFi, so be weird/whacky/stupid and differentiate - this is the best freaking aspect of the space, UTILISE IT.

Personally I can see so much potential in the underlying protocol, but if there’s no attention, there’s no community, resulting in rubbish LP fees that are being kept entirely afloat with mining rewards.