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Providing Customer Value through Non-Fungible Tokens:
A Preliminary Study
Lhorie Pirnay
NaDI, Université de Namur,
Belgium
lhorie.pirnay@unamur.be
Claire Deventer
NaDI, Université de Namur,
Belgium
claire.deventer@unamur.be
Victor Amaral de Sousa
NaDI, Université de Namur,
Belgium
LIRIS, KU Leuven, Belgium
victor.amaral@unamur.be
Abstract
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital certificates
of ownership that can be attached to any virtual or
physical asset. Recently, they have become
increasingly popular, especially with the advent of
metaverses, virtual spaces 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 and
broader characteristics of the initiatives. This paper
is a preliminary study to understand the value that
organizations can attempt to provide through NFT
initiatives. We examine 46 NFT initiatives from 42
companies by adopting an interpretive approach to
provide a first overview. Based on our analysis, we
discuss various elements on the design of NFT
initiatives, and propose a research agenda.
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-interchangeable 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 NFTs initiatives 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, on which we focus in this paper.
Although blockchain and NFTs bring new
opportunities, the launch of a NFT initiative,
including the NFT and the physical or digital assets
linked to it, is complex. Indeed, they come at a heavy
cost, with particularly big challenges in the
development of the information systems managing
and/or interacting with the NFTs, and blockchain
more generally (Amaral de Sousa et al., 2020). As the
value organizations intend to provide to their
customers via their NFT initiatives could play a key
role in the design of these systems, it is particularly
important to understand the different components of
that value that will ultimately be perceived by users.
The user perceived value is a key element in the
success of NFT initiatives because of its considerable
influence on information systems adoption behavior
(Kujala and Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, 2009).
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 a 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
Proceedings of the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2023
Page 4543
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10125/103185
978-0-9981331-6-4
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
company failed to provide the right type of value to
its community.1
As NFTs are new technologies, research on the
topic is still limited. Most research on NFTs focus on
the 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 initiatives specificities. Yet,
from a marketing and information systems
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 represents a gap in the
literature and 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.
In order to address this issue, we 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. 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, the
activity sector of the issuing organizations as well as
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. After that, a discussion of the results is provided in
Section 5. Section 6 describes the limitations of our
research. Based on the discussion and limitations, we
propose a further research agenda in Section 7.
Finally, Section 8 concludes the paper.
1https://www.cointribune.com/en/columns/the-crypto-gaming-column/
ubisofts-in-game-nfts-fail-making-only-400/ (accessed on 2022-09-22)
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 Ether,
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 blockchain2. ERC-721 provides the ability
to manage, own, or trade NFTs3on Ethereum and
other blockchain platforms. Since then, other
standards have emerged such as ERC-1155 for
multi-tokens management.4
From a technical perspective, a NFT is 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).
While the NFT itself is always digital, the underlying
asset can be digital or physical. Examples include
virtual clothing wearable in the metaverse, tickets to
access to an event (online or in person), real estate
buildings, real or digital cars, etc. A NFT initiative
launched by an organization is therefore always
composed of the NFT itself –the technical certificate
–and a set of objects or services that go with it. In
this study, as we focus on the user-perceived value,
we investigate NFTs initiatives as a whole,
considering that the value they can deliver does not
only reside in the technical characteristics of NFTs
but also in the products and/or services that are
attached to the NFTs. We therefore refer to NFT
initiatives as the development and launch of
initiatives involving the use of NFTs. This vision is
consistent with the “total” or “whole” product
described by Levitt (1983) and McKenna (1985),
who explain that to compete in the market,
companies do not only offer a core product (NFTs in
our case) but this core product augmented by side
attributes and add-ons.
In the NonFungible Corporation Annual Report
(2021), NFTs are divided into 5 segments: Art,
Collectibles, Video Games, Metaverse, Utilities, and
4https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-1
(accessed on 2022-09-22)
3http://erc721.org/ (accessed on 2022-09-22)
2https://ethereum.org/fr/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-7
(accessed on 2022-09-22)
Page 4544
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 financial diversification
assets (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, research on the topic
and in particular, on the value that NFTs can provide,
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 pieces of
work 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, aligned with the issuing organization’s
goals.
Considering the importance to understand 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 information
systems can deliver to their users (Kujala and
Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, 2009), further research is
needed to better frame the value that organizations
can offer to their (potential) customers with the help
of NFTs.
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
typology proposed by Holbrook (1999) as a basis.
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, p.14). Among the various
conceptualizations of value in marketing, Holbrook's
approach (Holbrook, 1999) is considered by many
researchers to be one of the most relevant
(Leroi-Werelds, 2019; Marinov, 2019). Holbrook’s
framework, that 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 a holistic approach in his conceptualization.
As there is limited knowledge and research on the
value that NFTs can provide, adopting such an
approach is particularly relevant for our objective to
identify further research avenues.
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 is its goal. 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 Table 1).
Page 4545
Table 1: Adapted from Holbrook (1999, p.12)
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.
An object has an extrinsic value when it is
valued not for itself but for what it can help achieve.
Money usually has extrinsic value because it is
valued not (only) for itself but mostly for what it can
help to acquire or achieve. On the other hand, an
object has an intrinsic value when it serves no other
purpose. A beautiful drawing can be purchased for
itself without serving any other purpose.
An object has an 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 a
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.
Due to the many technological novelties and new
business practices since the creation of the original
Holbrook framework, researchers highlighted the
need to adapt the framework to reflect these advances
(Leroi-Werelds, 2019) and propose new names and
scope for the Holbrook original cases (Gallarza et.
al., 2017; Leroi-Werelds, 2019) with respect to the
axis definition and the advances in today’s society. In
line with this, we propose in section 4 some
adaptation of the framework to better suit NFTs
characteristics.
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 help the latter.
Investigating the differences (if any) with initiatives
launched by individuals constitutes a lead for further
research. In addition, we excluded initiatives that do
not imply the creation of a NFT, such as NFT
marketplaces. The final sample includes 46 NFT
initiatives from 42 different organizations. In our
collection and selection process, we did not follow a
systematic procedure, which is a limitation in our
study, as further discussed in section 6.
To categorize and analyze the selected initiatives,
we first gathered, for each of them, the name of the
originating organization, its sector of activities, a
short description of the initiative, the category of
NFT (based on the classification proposed by
NonFungible Corporation Annual Report (2021),
previously described in Section 1), whether an offline
counterpart exists as well as the data sources and
optional comments regarding the initiative. While
most of these descriptive elements are quite
objective, at the heart of our analysis lies an
interpretive approach (Kleins and Myers, 1999) on
the types of values that each initiative can provide,
using Holbrook’s framework. For this part, each of
the authors separately reasoned about this question,
and documented, for each value in the framework,
whether, according to him/her the initiative could
provide this kind of value and how, with a short
explanation. After that, several rounds of concertation
were organized so as to discuss the consolidation of
the results, and resolving differences. The dataset, the
objective characteristics of initiatives and the details
of the analysis after majority consensus among the
authors are available online (Pirnay et al., 2022).
The fact that the values identified are based on
the researchers’ points of view is an important
limitation when it comes to evaluating the value
perceived by customers. Indeed, it would be more
relevant to involve a broader range of actual users, so
as to draw more conclusive and representative results,
as discussed in the limitations of the study. However,
we believe that the proposed preliminary analysis can
help identify opportunities for further research.
Page 4546
4. Results
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%) operates in the
luxury industry, while the other 20 organizations
(48%) target the general public.
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%) as presented
in Figure 1.
Figure 1. 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" (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. NFT initiatives classification
4.2 NFT customer value classification
In what follows, we classify and analyze our
sample of NFT initiatives according to Holbrook's
eight value types, originally named efficiency,
excellence, play, aesthetics, status, esteem, ethics, and
spirituality. Consistently with recent work on value
(Leroi-Werelds, 2019; Gallarza et al., 2017), we also
propose some adaptations of the names of the value
types to better match NFTs characteristics.
Efficiency refers to the self-oriented, extrinsic,
and active value type. In a NFT world, it could refer
to the "consumables" i.e., NFTs whose holders can
access an event or receive various prizes/products.
They hold value when used to obtain something else.
The possibilities for gifts that a customer can receive
thanks to a NFT are numerous. A first category of
gifts are 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
done 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-Garros.
Excellence refers to the self-oriented, extrinsic,
and reactive value type. When a customer buys a
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, as explained in the
original Holbrook (1999) definition, excellence is a
possibility of what can be obtained if the customer
consumes or uses the object. In the case of NFTs, if
the customer decides to sell the NFT, only then (s)he
will get its money value. Before selling the NFT, this
one carries excellence value, the potentiality of
monetary benefits. Because of the inherent rarity and
uniqueness of a NFT, most initiatives have
"Excellence" value. In addition, 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
thus rename the "excellence" value as "speculations".
Play refers to the self-oriented, intrinsic, and
active value type. While it might be trivial for some
NFTs initiatives that are 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 NFTs in a given
Page 4547
collection, a sort of hunt, a game, is created that
consists of finding the remaining NFTs. From this
point of view, the acquisition of a 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 their VIP status 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 a 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"
(Morris 1999, p.23). 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 a 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 2.
Table 2. Adaptation of Holbrook perceived
value framework to NFTs
Observing the distribution of the initiatives in the
several types of value is also of interest. Figure 3
summarizes our classification of NFT initiatives
along the Holbrook framework.
Figure 3. Distribution of the NFT initiatives
among the framework’s values
The three most frequently represented values, as
we have renamed them in Table 2, are "speculations",
"art and memories" and "possession of rarity". This
suggests that NFTs are still mainly considered as
prestigious financial investments in artworks. Further
research could investigate if some inherent
characteristics of NFTs, such as being
non-interchangeable, can explain this distribution.
These three value types are reactive, indicating that
they require less effort to integrate the NFT into a
Page 4548
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 a
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 linked
to extrinsic value types. 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 may 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.
As shown in Figure 4, we find that the vast
majority of initiatives offer many different types of
value. However, very few initiatives combine more
than 6 types of value. While we cannot provide an
indication of what the ideal number and what
combinations are the most interesting, these could
constitute further research opportunities.
Figure 4. Distribution of the number of perceived
values per NFT initiatives
5. Discussion
Throughout the value analysis presented in the
previous section, we have made a number of
observations that are worth discussing and may lead
to further research directions. We structure the
discussion around the 8 types of values considered in
the adapted framework.
Starting with Consumables, we observe that the
NFTs are mostly vouchers that allow the obtention of
digital or physical gifts. In many cases, the gift is tied
to the organization issuing it. If between the purchase
and the usage of the voucher, the organization goes
bankrupt or the event is canceled, the NFT has no
more consumable value. Therefore, although the
platform used to manage the vouchers/tickets is
decentralized, the ability to realize the value is highly
centralized, as it lies in the hands of the issuing
organization.
Next, for the Speculations value, we observe
that many NFT initiatives, directly or indirectly, carry
some speculation value. This is not surprising as NFT
are per nature unique assets. Similarly, Bouraga
(2021) indicates a correlation between the supply of
NFTs issued and the success of the initiative.
Looking at the Play value type, we notice that
the platform on which the NFTs run plays a critical
role. This is indeed the platform that allows the NFT
users to play games. When NFTs are per nature
decentralized, this study highlights that the platforms
are often linked to a single organization (ex. NBA).
Concerning the Art/Memories value type, it is
interesting to notice that many analyzed initiatives
use a digital piece of art to deliver this value.
However, those creations can mainly be accessible
and shared with everyone thanks to a simple
screenshot. This questions the viability of NFT
initiatives aiming only at delivering Art/Memories
type of value. A solution might come from platforms
such as metaverse or virtual worlds that allow the
display of NFTs. If the NFT is a digital piece of art
that can only be seen through metaverses, then the
relevance of an “art only” NFT initiative is
reinforced.
The Status and Possession of Rarity values
come from the ability of others to acknowledge one’s
possessions. Once again, the platform built on top of
NFTs plays a critical role, especially for digital art.
Without a dedicated platform, NFTs are merely
records in a database proving ownership. They are
not very visible and it is hard to show to others our
possessions.
For the Charity value, the initiatives of our
sample propose to use the funds raised through the
sale of the issued NFTs for charity and good causes.
Page 4549
In most cases, the fundraising is done only through
the initial sale of the NFT. An interesting possibility
to investigate is the extension of the fundraising
beyond initial sale. The Ethereum Improvement
Proposal EIP-29815proposes a standard for NFTs
with royalties, in which a percentage of each sale
(beyond the initial one) is sent to a specific receiver.
With such a standard, each resale of the NFT will
provide royalties to the charity, further increasing the
charity value at the same time.
Concerning Community Belonging value type,
no initiatives in our sample mentioned the ideas
traditionally attached to blockchain: decentralization
and independence. It could be interesting to
investigate from the user point of view if these ideas
are important and if they might somehow create a
“NFT community” feeling.
We also believe that, despite the community
belonging value a NFT can create, it is important to
remain consistent with the brand positioning. For
instance, using a blockchain relying on the
Proof-of-Work algorithm consensus, which is
consuming a lot of energy, is not consistent with a
brand that wants to embed ecological values.
6. Limitations
In this study, we have gathered information on a
number of NFT initiatives and analyzed, among other
things, the user perceived value they could potentially
provide, following an interpretive approach.
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, as we did not follow a systematic
procedure for the collection. 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, NFTs or sectors.
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
5https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981 (accessed on 2022-09-22)
of benefits described to their users. A broader set of
actual users should also be involved in the evaluation
of the initiatives.
7. Research agenda
Additionally to the research direction mentioned
in the previous discussion, this section presents a
research agenda of five research avenues.
7.1 Extended, more systematic analysis
Our paper presents a preliminary study analyzing
organizations' NFT initiatives. Generalization of our
conclusions is limited based on the data collection
conducted in this article. We propose to expand our
study using a more rigorous methodology to
generalize our findings. For example, a more
systematic research methodology could allow
exploration of the sectors missing from this article, or
deep dive in a specific sector. NFTs can also have an
impact in other sectors than those analyzed in this
article, such as education (see, for instance, Zao and
Si, 2021 or Onete et al., 2022), healthcare (see
Musamih, 2022) or real-estate (see Moringiello,
2022) among others. Another possible extension to
this research is to analyze the NFT initiatives offered
by individuals, which were not discussed in the
present paper.
7.2 Analysis of the (mis-)alignment between
the intended and perceived value
We also advocate that further research may
involve NFTs holders to investigate the value they
actually derive from the initiatives and survey
organizations that issue NFTs to highlight the types
of value they actually intend to deliver. This would
help organizations to design NFT initiatives that are
well aligned with their value delivery and capture
strategies. 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
actually intended to deliver. Analyzing the extent to
which the two are aligned is crucial as failed NFT
initiatives can damage corporate reputations. Another
aspect worthy of investigation is the value
co-creation (Leclercq et al, 2016). What about NFTs
co-created by the customers with the issuing
organization ?
Page 4550
7.3 Importance of the ecosystem around the
NFT initiatives
As mentioned in the result and discussion
section, the value that NFTs can provide is often
dependent on platforms built on top of them. This
suggests that these platforms and their socio-technical
aspects are important to consider when designing
NFT initiatives. The decentralized character of
blockchain and NFTs enables new initiatives to plug
into existing ecosystems or communities. It also
implies that new ecosystems or communities can be
created and later on bring on new contributions and
partners, reinforcing the overall value that a NFT
initiative can provide.
From an information systems engineering
perspective, especially as blockchain entails
particularly complex challenges, it is important to
think not only about the creation and management of
the NFTs per se, but also on the integrations that are
required with other systems present in the ecosystem.
7.4 Optimal design of NFTs initiatives
Despite the fact that our study is still preliminary,
it already highlights the complexity and subtleties of
the design of a compelling NFT initiative. Further
research can investigate the optimal number and
combinations of value types an organization wants to
provide, which value types are the most interesting
and, last but not least, how to provide a specific value
type clearly and efficiently. For example, it could be
interesting to investigate how the integration of some
particular technologies such as augmented reality in
NFTs initiatives can influence the different value
types. The question of designing NFTs that provide
particular value types is a meaningful avenue for
further research.
8. 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.
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