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Providing Customer Value through Non-Fungible Tokens:
A Preliminary Study
Lhorie PIRNAYa, Claire DEVENTERa and Victor AMARAL DE SOUSAa,b
aNaDI, Namur Digital Institute, University of Namur, Belgium
bResearch Center for Information Systems (LIRIS), KU Leuven, Belgium
Abstract
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital certificates
of ownership that can be attached to any virtual or
physical item. Recently, they have become
increasingly popular, especially with the advent of
metaverses, virtual spaces that are shared and
accessible online. Many organizations are launching
NFT initiatives for a variety of reasons including
retaining customers, developing new revenue streams,
or demonstrating that they are keeping up with the
latest technological advances. When organizations
launch NFT initiatives, they attempt to provide value
to NFT users in various ways, depending on the NFT
characteristics. This paper is a preliminary study to
understand the value offered by organizations and
perceived by NFT users. We examine 46 NFT
initiatives from 42 companies to determine what value
can be provided to users of NFTs. The goal is to
provide a basis for further analysis on the values of
NFTs and to support the design of Information
Systems embedding NFTs.
Keywords: Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), perceived
value, Blockchain, smart contracts, ERC-721
1. Introduction
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are virtual tokens
that represent certificates of authenticity for unique
and non-exchangeable digital assets that may or may
not be linked to a physical counterpart. Relying on
blockchain, NFTs benefit from the features of this
technology, such as proof of ownership and
traceability of the underlying assets, as well as various
ways to manage them (e.g., buy, sell, use for different
purposes) without relying on trusted third parties.
Recently, many individuals, organizations, and
corporations started NFT projects across a wide range
of industries and sectors, including but not limited to
(virtual) real estate (Dowling, 2022b), certificates of
various kinds, luxury goods and clothing (Joy et al.,
2022), consumable goods, digital art (Whitaker 2019;
Franceschet et al., 2021; Kugler, 2021), event ticketing
(Regner et al., 2019) entertainment and catering.
A recent report by Grand View Research (2021)
states that the market for NFTs is estimated to be
$20.44 billion in 2022, with a compound annual
growth rate of 33.9% from 2022 to 2030, making it an
increasingly interesting playground for organizations.
Although NFTs and blockchain technology offer
a variety of new opportunities for organizations, NFT
initiatives rely on information technologies, thereby
requiring a range of activities and efforts related to
information systems (ISs) and software engineering.
The development of solutions that rely on blockchain
technology (including NFTs) presents a number of
challenges in addition to traditional information
systems engineering. These include the steep learning
curve behind such technologies, their immutable
nature that makes it difficult or practically impossible
to update faulty smart contracts or to modify/remove
data once it is stored on the blockchain, and the lack
of people with the necessary skills and knowledge
(Amaral de Sousa et al., 2020). While it is important
from a general perspective to ensure that information
systems actually deliver value to various stakeholders
is key, it is even more important for blockchain-based
initiatives given the challenges and costs involved.
Value-based information systems engineering
(Kujala and Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, 2009)
comprises a set of tools and methods that aim to make
value considerations explicit throughout the
development process to increase the likelihood that the
system's goals will be achieved, which includes
delivering the intended value to the stakeholders
involved (Kujala and Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila,
2009). While the question of the value that an IS can
bring depends on the point of view of the adopted
stakeholder, the value perceived by users is considered
as one of the key elements because of its considerable
influence on IS adoption behavior (Kujala and
Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, 2009). In the context of this
research, we define users as the people or
organizations receiving, buying, selling, trading,
holding and otherwise using NFTs.
Considering this, from an ISs engineering
perspective, it is critical to clarify the value that
organizations intend to provide to their customers
through NFT initiatives in order to develop and
implement them accordingly. It will also help identify
the NFT (and more broadly, the related systems’)
features that are the most important to consider in the
design, development and evaluation process.
While a number of NFT projects seem to assume
that NFTs necessarily deliver value to their users, this
hypothesis has not been evaluated. Moreover, the
failure of certain NFT initiatives suggests that the
creation of an NFT in itself does not necessarily create
perceived value. As Nansen (2022) shows, one-third
of NFTs created are not profitable because they fail to
capture user interest. A good example of this is the
failed launch of Ubisoft's NFT. Amongst the 2250
created Ubisoft NFTs, only 15 were sold because the
company failed to provide the right type of value to its
community.
1
Most research on NFTs has been examined from
a technical, legal, or economic perspective (Fairfield,
2021; Wang et al., 2021; and Bao and Roubaud, 2022).
The few existing papers on the value of NFTs focused
on the financial value and did not integrate other
existing types of value such as hedonic, social or
altruistic values, lacking a crucial viewpoint on the
NFT specificities. Yet, from a marketing and ISs
engineering perspective, while the financial value is
certainly of importance, the value perceived by the
users is a multi-faceted construct that includes a
broader set of dimensions that are not covered in
existing work.
The foregoing demonstrates the need for more in-
depth research on the perceived value of NFTs created
by organizations and how these organizations can
manage their NFT development strategy with the goal
of maximizing the value perceived by users.
Therefore, we aim to extend existing NFT research by
adopting the experiential perspective of customer
perceived value in Holbrook (1999). We apply and
adapt the original Holbrook framework to the specific
case of NFTs. Our proposed framework provides
1
https://www.cointribune.com/en/columns/the-crypto-gaming-
column/ubisofts-in-game-nfts-fail-making-only-400/
2
https://ethereum.org/fr/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-7
guidance for organizations to design value-
delivering NFT initiatives, as well as a basis for
further research on the perceived value of NFT buyers.
To this end, we collected and analyzed a sample of 46
NFT initiatives led by organizations. We provide an
overview of the categories of identified NFTs, of the
activity sector of the issuing organizations as well as
of the potential value that users or customers could
perceive from them. The proposed analysis serves as a
basis to identify opportunities to leverage NFTs to
provide value, and to identify further research
directions in this area.
After introducing our conceptual background and
related work in Section 2, we describe the
methodology used to collect and analyze NFT
initiatives in Section 3. We then present our
observations and show their implications in Section 4.
Section 5 describes the limitations of our research, as
well as avenues for further research. Finally, Section 6
concludes the paper.
2. Background and Related Work
2.1 Blockchain and Non-Fungible Tokens
Blockchain technology, developed in 2008
(Nakamoto, 2008), has increasingly been a source of
technological innovation since then. This technology
allows the decentralized management of assets in the
form of tokens and has enabled the creation of
numerous virtual currencies, such as Bitcoin or
Ethereum, to name the most famous. In January 2018,
William Entriken, Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, and
Nastassia Sachs formalized a new standard, Ethereum
Request for Comments 721 (ERC-721), which
describes how to create non-fungible or 'one-of-a-kind'
tokens on the Ethereum blockchain
2
. ERC-721
provides the ability to manage, own, or trade NFTs
3
on
Ethereum and other blockchain platforms. Since then,
other standards have emerged such as ERC-1155 for
multi-tokens management.
4
A NFT is thus defined as a "unit of data stored on
a blockchain that certifies a digital asset to be unique
and therefore not interchangeable, while offering a
unique digital certificate of ownership for the NFT"
(Evans 2019). Specifically, NFTs can take many forms
in the eyes of their users: virtual clothing worn in the
metaverse, tickets to access an event, digital
counterpart of physical goods, etc. In this study, we
3
http://erc721.org/
4
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-1
define an NFT initiative as both the creation and
launch of an NFT and the set of benefits that the NFT
can provide to its users. In the NonFungible
Corporation Annual Report (2021), NFTs are divided
into 5 segments: Art, Collectibles, Video Games,
Metaverse, Utilities, and Miscellaneous. Although
NFTs were originally created on the Ethereum
blockchain, they were quickly implemented on other
blockchains for monetary reasons (Lounge, 2020) and
these tokens can be used for marketing purposes
(Chohan, 2021), fraud prevention and secondary
market control (Regner et al., 2019), and as a financial
diversification asset (Aharon and Demir, 2021),
among others.
Due to the recent nature of NFTs and although
these tokens are of great interest to both the scientific
community and organizations, scientific research on
the topic is still limited. The current literature focuses
mainly on the financial aspects of NFTs, analyzing
market shares and trading activities (Nadini, 2021),
speculation (Sako, 2021; Wilson, 2021; Dowling,
2022b), financial returns (Aharon and Demir 2021),
and market interactions (Ante, 2021; Dowling, 2022a;
Dowling 2022b). Another important strand of
literature addresses the technical aspects and
characteristics of NFTs (Evans 2019), including their
challenges (Wang 2021). Finally, other works
highlight the impact of NFTs (Whitaker 2019; van
Haaften-Schick and Whitaker, 2021) or the
opportunities (Wang 2021) in various fields such as
art, gaming industry, virtual events, digital
collectibles, and metaverse.
2.2 Value of NFTs
A widely accepted view on NFTs is that their
main characteristic - scarcity - makes them extremely
valuable assets (Chohan, 2021). The fact that NFTs are
unique and that blockchain can help prove their
uniqueness and ownership is also a key determinant of
NFT users’ perceived value (Dowling, 2022a).
However, uniqueness alone does not guarantee
popularity or success, as highlighted by the number of
NFTs collection failures (Nansens, 2022).
As concluded in a correlation analysis between
the popularity of NFT initiatives and their
characteristics (Bouraga, 2021), the total supply of
NFTs and the number of NFT holders appear as
important considerations and are positively correlated
with the success of the analyzed initiatives. The
number of features that are provided beyond standards
used for the underlying smart contracts (e.g. ERC-721
and ERC-1155) appears however as a less important
success predictor. In order to have a broad range of
users interested in receiving, buying, selling, holding
and trading NFTs, it is critical to deliver value to those
users, through the designed initiatives, and in
alignment with the issuing organization’s goals.
Considering the importance of the value that
NFTs can deliver to their users in order to ensure the
success of NFT initiatives, and various dimensions
composing the value that IS can deliver to their users
(Kujala and Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, 2009), further
research is needed to better frame the value that NFTs
can offer to (potential) users.
In order to address this issue, to conceptualize the
value that NFT initiatives can offer to their users, we
adopt a marketing perspective and use the value
topology proposed by Holbrook (1999).
2.3 Perceived Value and Holbrook’s
typology
Creating customer value is at the heart of the
marketing discipline definition (AMA, 2022). Indeed,
a primary concern of marketers is to create and deliver
superior value to achieve competitive advantage
(Woodruff, 1997). A widely accepted definition of
value is ''the consumer's overall assessment of the
utility of a product based on perceptions of what is
received and what he is given.'' (Zeithaml, 1988).
Among the various conceptualizations of value in
marketing, Holbrook's (1999) approach is considered
by many researchers to be one of the most attractive
(Leroi-Werelds, 2019; Marinov, 2019). Holbrook,
who is considered a "paradigm" in value research
(Gallarza et. al, 2017), aimed to provide a "systematic
and integrated approach" to conceptualizing value
(Holbrook 1999, p. 3) by combining theories from
different disciplines and adopting an holistic approach
in his conceptualization. As such a holistic approach is
considered to be valuable for organizations to design
information systems delivering value, we believe that
Holbrook’s framework is particularly relevant for the
present study.
According to Holbrook’s definition, customer
perceived value results from the interaction between a
subject and an object (Holbrook, 1999). In other
words, the value perceived by a customer depends on
how that customer responds to the product/service and
what the customer's goal is. To characterize the
different types of value a customer may perceive,
Holbrook created a typology along three main axes:
self-oriented versus other-oriented, extrinsic versus
intrinsic, and active versus reactive (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Adapted from Holbrook (1999)
A perceived value is self-oriented when a
customer aims to obtain value for himself and when he
does not care about the reaction of others. For
example, if a customer thinks a flower is beautiful, it
has self-oriented value regardless of whether others
think the flower is ugly. In contrast, a value is
considered other-oriented when a customer perceives
a value based only on the reactions of others. For
example, if I buy a very expensive painting just to
show my wealth, the value I perceive from the painting
results from the admiration of others, it depends on
others.
An object has extrinsic value when it is valued not
for itself but for what it can help achieve. For example,
money usually has extrinsic value because it is valued
not for itself but for all the goods it can help to acquire.
On the other hand, an object has intrinsic value when
it serves no other purpose. A beautiful drawing, for
example, can be purchased for itself without serving
any other purpose.
An object has active value if the value results from
the customer's use of the object. This means that the
customer must voluntarily act on the object. For
example, the value of a game arises only when the
customer is playing. In contrast, an object has reactive
value when the value does not require the customer to
do anything. For example, a stock market investment
has reactive value as long as the customer does not
decide to sell it, a piece of art has reactive value
because its very presence makes it beautiful.
3. Methodology
In order to analyze the potential value that NFT
initiatives could provide to their users, we adopted a
multiple case study research method (Robert, 2003).
Considering the limited scientific literature on NFT
initiatives in light of their recent character, we selected
case studies and gathered data on them mostly from
gray literature. Secondary data were collected from
three main sources: (i) announcements of initiatives by
organizations retrieved through the Google search
engine, (ii) NFT marketplaces such as opensea.io, and
(iii) press articles about NFT initiatives retrieved
through Google News. To build our final sample, we
chose to exclude NFTs initiatives launched by
individuals and only consider organization initiatives,
as we aim to provide guidelines for organizations. In
addition, we excluded initiatives that do not imply the
creation of an NFT, such as NFT marketplaces. The
final sample includes 46 NFT initiatives from 42
different organizations.
We adopted an interpretive approach (Kleins and
Myers, 1999) to analyze the NFT initiatives across the
sample of case studies. To ensure the reliability of our
analysis, NFTs initiatives were analyzed by the three
authors independently with rounds of concertation for
managing and resolving differences. For each
initiative, we collected the name of the organization,
the industrial sector of activities of the organization, a
short description of the initiative, the category of NFT
(based on the classification proposed by NonFungible
Corporation Annual Report (2021), as described in
Section 1), whether an offline counterpart exists as
well as the data sources and optional comments
regarding the initiative. In addition to that, each of the
authors proposed, based on his/her interpretation and
attempting to be as broad as possible, a set of values
(defined in Holbrook’s typology) that each initiative
can provide.
While this research methodology does not allow
to draw definitive conclusions on the values that NFT
initiatives can deliver, it provides a good basis for
further studies, as discussed in Section 5.
4. Results
In this section, we describe our analysis of the
case studies with Holbrook’s lens on the NFT value.
For transparency, the full dataset and analysis are
accessible online.
4.1 Description of sample of NFT initiatives
In this subsection, we describe our sample of 46
organizations' NFT initiatives. First, the analysis of
sectors of activity shows that slightly more than half
of the sample (22 organizations, 52%) operate in the
luxury industry, while the other 20 organizations
(48%) target the general public (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Proportion of luxury organizations
The most represented sectors were "Clothing and
accessories" (43%), followed by "Sport and leisure"
(24%), "Food and beverages" (21%), "Luxury cars"
(7%) and "Health and beauty care" (5%) (Figure 3).
Figure 3. NFT initiatives sector distribution
Regarding NFT types, according to the classification
of the NonFungible Corporation Annual Report
(2021), 15 initiatives (33%) of our sample were "Art",
13 (28%) were "Collectibles", 10 (22%) were
"Utilities", 5 (11%) were "Video Games", 2 (4%) were
package containing NFTs from "Collectibles" and
from "Metaverses" and 1 (2%) was only "Metaverses".
4.2 NFT Consumer Value Classification
In what follows, we classify and analyze our
sample of NFT initiatives according to Holbrook's
eight value types: efficiency, excellence, play,
aesthetics, status, esteem, ethics, and spirituality.
Efficiency refers to the self-oriented, extrinsic,
and active value type. In an NFT world, it could refer
to the "consumables" i.e., NFTs whose holders can
access an event or receive various prizes/products.
They have value when used to obtain something else.
The possibilities for gifts that a customer can receive
thanks to an NFT are numerous. A first category of
gifts is access to exclusive events, such as Guerlain
granting its NFT holders access to the Vallée de la
Millière. Second, the gifts may be highly personalized
customer services, as in the case of Prada, Cartier or
LVMH. In addition, they could be VIP status or
benefits during an event (faster entry, food and
beverage vouchers, free merchandise) as at Coachella.
It could also be physical goods, like the Lamborghini
sculpture or the Coca Cola special edition refrigerator.
In addition, NFTs can grant access to other NFTs, as
in the case of Burger King, which allows owners of the
three NFTs in its collection to purchase a fourth NFT,
or priority in the purchase of other NFTs or tickets for
real life events, as with Roland Garos.
Excellence refers to the self-oriented, extrinsic,
and reactive value type. When a customer buys an
NFT as a money placement, the "excellence" part of
that NFT value is the price it has in the market. Until
the customer sells the NFT, it remains a reactive, self-
oriented extrinsic value type, a possibility of what can
be obtained if the customer decides to sell it. Because
of the inherent rarity and uniqueness of an NFT, most
initiatives have "Excellence" value. In addition, some
companies such as Prada, Cartier, or LVMH use NFTs
as proof of authenticity or, like Alfa Romeo, as proof
of quality. In this case, the customer buys the NFT as
reinsurance for the value of the physical goods. We
could therefore call the "excellence" values
"speculations".
Play refers to the self-oriented, intrinsic, and
active value type. While it might be trivial for some
NFTs to be games or contain one, such as the Punks
Comics book or Sorare's virtual soccer game, for some
organizations the "play" value type is in the collection
of NFTs themselves. For example, when a customer
tries to own all the different NFTs in a given
collection, a hunt, a game, is created that consists of
finding the remaining NFTs. From this point of view,
the acquisition of an NFT in a collection has a "play"
value. In addition, some NFTs offer surprises, such as
Gucci's crystal ball, where the customer does not know
what the NFT is until after the purchase. Some virtual
clothing NFTs also offer the ability to visualize the
item in augmented reality, so customers can have fun
trying it on virtually.
Aesthetics is also quite straightforward to
translate in the NFT world, as it refers to the beauty of
art, the self-oriented, intrinsic, and reactive value type.
While many NFTs in the Art category carry
"Aesthetics" value simply because of their beauty,
some NFTs also enable customers to remember good
memories, such as the NBA's "Top Moments," where
the NFT shows some of the best moments from the
league's games. We could therefore rename the
Aesthetics category to "Art / Memories" for the
specific case of NFTs.
Status or "impression management" refers to
something that helps the customer make a good
impression on others or be admired. It is the extrinsic
and active type of value directed toward others. The
appropriate NFTs can be expensive clothing or
accessories that we can display in the metaverse. Some
initiatives also provide other ways for customers to
show their possessions to others, such as the NBA user
profile, where you can show all your NFTs to the
community. When NFTs grant exclusive access to
events, customers can explain the event to others and
brag about the VIP status they received as a result.
On the other hand, esteem is the other-oriented,
extrinsic and reactive value type. Holbrook describes
this value type as the value that materialistic people
can derive from highly desirable possessions. NFTs
inherently have this characteristic of uniqueness, but
some of them, such as those designed by famous
influencers or designers like Balenciaga or Gucci, are
designed to trigger this particular value type in the
eyes of the customers. In an NFT world, "esteem" type
of value is best represented as "possession of rarity".
Ethics is the other-oriented, intrinsic and active
value type. It refers to the fact that a customer wants
to positively influence the lives of others by doing a
good deed. In the world of NFTs, this is often
emphasized by companies in the form of charity
donations where all the benefits of the NFTs sales are
donated to charity.
Finally, spirituality is the other-oriented, intrinsic
and reactive value type. A customer experiences a
"spirituality" type of value when he or she can lose the
sense of self. According to Holbrook's definition, it
"involves a mystical disappearance of the self- other
dichotomy in a manner that seems to merge the self
with the Other". While the Other could be some God
or Cosmic Force, in today's society it tends to take the
form of a community with shared ideals. For example,
Tomorrowland music festival aims to create a sense of
belonging to a community of peace through music, and
a customer might experience spirituality value while
feeling they are closer to that ideal thanks to the
festival. In an NFT world, it could refer to belonging
to a special community by owning the NFT, such as
the NBA community, the soccer community, or
Coachella family.
On the basis of these observations, we propose to
rename the types of value proposed by Holbrook with
terms that are relevant for NFTs, as shown in Table 1.
5
Pirnay, Lhorie; Deventer, Claire; Amaral de Sousa, Victor
(2022), “NFTs organizations initiatives table”, Mendeley Data, V1,
doi: 10.17632/d6437wdc4w.1
Table 1. Adaptation of Holbrook perceived value
framework to NFTs
Observing the distribution of the initiatives in the
several types of value is also of interest. Table 2
summarizes our classification of NFT initiatives along
the Holbrook framework.
Legend: [1] Adidas, [2] Alfa Romeo, [3] Balenciaga (1), [4] Balenciaga (2),
[5] Breitling, [6] Budweiser, [7] Burberry, [8] Burger King, [9] Clinique, [10]
Coachella (1), [11] Coachella (2), [12] Coachella (3), [13] Coachella (4), [14]
Coca-Cola, [15] Décathlon, [16] DKNY, [17] Dolce & Gabbana, [18] Dom
Pérignon, [19] Football Clubs licensing Football Player Cards with SoRare,
[20] Formula 1, [21] Givenchy (1), [22] Givenchy (2), [23] Grammys, [24]
Gucci, [25] Gucci x SuperPlastic, [26] Guerlain (1), [27] Guerlain (2), [28]
Havaianas, [29] Hennessy, [30] Lamborghini, [31] Louis Vuitton, [32]
Marvel, [33] McDonald's, [34] NBA (1), [35] NBA (2), [36] Nike, [37] One
to one Monaco (salon professionnel), [38] OTB Group, Prada Group, LVMH
and Cartier (Richemont Group), Mercedes Benz, [39] Pepsi, [40] Quick, [41]
Rayban, [42] Robert Mondavi (US Winery), [43] Roland Garros (1), [44]
Roland Garros (2), [45] SuperBowl, [46] Ubisoft. All references are cited in
the dataset accessible online
5
.
Table 2. Classification of NFT initiatives features
in Holbrook perceived value framework
The three most frequently represented values, as
we have renamed them in Table 1, are "speculations",
"art and memories" and "possession of rarity". This
suggests that NFTs are still mainly considered as
prestigious financial investments in artworks. These
three value types are reactive, indicating that they
require less effort to integrate the NFT into a broader
interactive IT ecosystem such as a game, forum, or app
than the NFTs providing active types of value. As it
can be seen from the table, the value of an NFT is
reactive in most cases. However, this could also
indicate that NFT technology is still in its infancy and
that there is still room for organizations to innovate
and propose these types of integrations. The success of
the NBA's Top Moments collection or the startup
Sorare could be partly due to their ability to add more
value with this part of interactivity.
We also observe that NFTs are most often valued
for extrinsic reasons. This could mean that NFTs are
still seen as a means rather than an end in themselves.
NFTs alone may not be sufficient in the eyes of their
users. While their high value on the market is the most
common form of extrinsic value in our sample
(speculations and possession of rarities), companies
can gain a competitive advantage by offering gifts and
benefits (consumables) or means to appear more active
(status). On the other hand, organizations can
differentiate themselves by investing in the intrinsic
part of the value of NFTs, which is less of a focus. By
adding more interactive and entertaining features, such
as AR visualizations, or by focusing on creating a
community with fair and ethical values that could be
sustained through the exchange of NFTs. This
suggestion should however be further investigated.
Indeed, previous works suggested that the number of
features of NFTs beyond basic features was not
correlated with their popularity (Bouraga, 2021).
As shown in Figure 4, we find that the vast
majority of initiatives offer many different types of
value. However, very few initiatives manage to
combine more than 6 types of value, suggesting that a
trade-off should be made between developing value
aspects of the NFT initiative and maintaining its
consistency and relevance.
Figure 4. Distribution of the number of perceived
values per NFT initiatives
5. Limitations and further research
In this study, we have gathered information on a
number of NFT initiatives and analyzed, among other
things, the value they could potentially provide.
Although this preliminary value analysis can be used
as a basis for further research directions, some
associated limitations are worth mentioning.
A first limitation concerns the sample of NFT
initiatives analyzed. The sample is not guaranteed to
be representative of all NFT initiatives led by
organizations. Therefore, we cannot generalize our
findings with respect to the distribution of NFT
initiatives across the identified categories and sectors.
Further research could apply a more systematic
approach to capture NFT initiatives in a more
representative manner, or instead focus on specific
categories or NFTs or sectors in their analysis.
A second limitation lies in the method used to
analyze the NFT values. To describe how each NFT
initiative could (potentially) provide value to its users,
we relied on the subjective perceptions of the authors
of the paper and discussions among them, trying to
reach agreement and be as complete as possible. As a
result, we cannot conclude that particular NFT
initiatives actually provide the kinds of benefits
described to their users. Because we have not
interacted with the organizations that issued the NFTs
we analyzed, we cannot assert that the types of value
identified in our analysis are those that the issuing
organizations intend to deliver. However, we believe
that our analysis can serve as a basis for organizations
to identify potential ideas on how they can use NFTs
to provide specific types of value to their customers.
We also advocate that further research involves the
actual holders of NFTs to understand the value they
derive from them and the actual organizations that
issue the NFTs in question to understand the type of
value they intend to deliver. Analyzing the extent to
which the two are aligned and how the value provided
relates to the characteristics of NFTs and blockchain
platforms are promising further areas of research that
can help organizations develop successful and value-
providing NFT initiatives.
Next, in our study, we took the point of view of
the users of NFT initiatives and analyzed the value
they can potentially derive from them. We analyze the
question from the point of view of the spending
organizations to see what kind of value they can get
from NFT initiatives. This would help organizations
design NFT initiatives that are well aligned with their
value delivery and capture strategies.
As mentioned earlier, failed NFT initiatives can
damage corporate reputations. In this context, another
possible research direction would be to assess the risks
associated with NFT initiatives and guidelines to
mitigate them. While the research presented in this
paper does not focus on the risks, it can provide initial
insights to avoid the risk of creating NFTs that do not
add value to the targeted users.
Last but not least, it is important to remember that
NFT initiatives, although they may have physical or
"offline" counterparts, are essentially digital initiatives
that rely on information systems. Therefore, exploring
the relationships between different components in
information systems that incorporate NFT and
blockchain platforms, and how they are integrated to
provide an overall experience and value to users, is an
interesting further research direction.
6. Conclusions
This study is one of the first attempts to analyze
the value of NFT from the user's perspective, by
incorporating multiple dimensions of this value, unlike
previous work seldom incorporating other values than
the financial one.
By analyzing a set of 46 NFT initiatives launched
by organizations with a marketing perspective on the
concept of value, we were able to propose a
preliminary version of an adapted value framework
based on Holbrook (1999) for NFT initiatives that
includes eight types: consumables, speculations, play,
art and memories, status, possessions of rarity, charity
and community belonging. While NFT initiatives are
identified by industry experts as an important trend to
pursue, this study provides a common foundation for
further research on NFT users' perceived value and
value-driven design of NFT and of information
systems involving NFTs. It also suggests avenues for
further research in this NFT area, as detailed in the
previous section.
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