Most businesses try to constantly engage with their customers in an effort to build a bond with them. It's an established understanding that customers tend to not only become repeat buyers, but also self-motivated promoters of a business that they feel a connection with.

Nike's recent move to sign up Colin Kaepernick as a brand ambassador is a step to bond with minorities and civil rights' activists. This may seem like a political stance, but is actually just a business decision as it builds an impeccable bond between Nike and specific fast-growing demographics. Brands have often made bold moves to align themselves with certain members of the population--Nike isn't reinventing the wheel here.

However, aligning a brand with a specific population segment limits the net reach of a brand as it carves the brand's bond with a portion of the market. For this very reason, many brands opt for more timid and less politicized moves.

Some brands dedicate great effort and years, if not decades, to develop a good strategy to connect with their customers. Such an approach may work for major enterprises with a new operational goal, but it cannot work for start-ups. Most start-ups are cash-strapped and time is generally not on their side as the fixed cost of their operations is not affordable for too long; consequently, emerging brands and small businesses do not have the resources to build a connection with their customer base through a multi-year campaign.

The problem here is that the current form of commerce does not natively internalize the customer into the business. What if the customers have a vested interest in the success of an emerging business?

Carving the User-Investor

At present, businesses need to sustain important relationships with two groups of people: the investors and the customers.

Naturally, a business needs to please its stakeholders (investors) to sustain its funding and it also needs to satisfy its customers to ensure it can build a growing revenue. A new blockchain project, INFLEUM, has the ability to disrupt commerce such that customers and stakeholders become one and the same—a form of commerce inclusive to customers becoming stakeholders.

The current state of commerce is such that stakeholders and customers are distinctly different sets of people. Also, in the current state of commerce, a business usually has very few stakeholders. This distinction exists because most of the businesses functionalities are done by people (employees, freelancers, consultants, etc.), who have no stake in the success of the business and instead earn a fixed earning directly from the funding provided by the investors.

INFLEUM gives each person in its ecosystem an ID (through the Infinity Code) and this tracks their activity on the network, thereby enabling the successful use of INFLEUM’s Proof of Influence (PoI) mechanism. INFLEUM starting decentralized applications facilitate not only the purchase of products but also their promotion and enhancement. Thus, the platform will encourage customers to take part in the scaling and growth of the businesses they like.

Customers will have a stake in the success of their business; their ID will give them an allocation to the rewards dedicated to those who influence the business’s growth through any number of means.

INFLEUM’s Proof of Influence will allow any customer to easily have a stake in the growth a business gains, thereby building a unique bond between a business and its target audience. The border between being a stakeholder and being a customer will be erased, and businesses will be encouraged to incentivize customers to, in fact, become their stakeholders.

INFLEUM can carve a new format of commerce in which businesses can connect to customers in a new way: allow them to have a piece of the success. This will encourage people to become regular customers and actively spread positive word-of-mouth. The seamlessness of the PoI will make sure this implicit stake doesn’t feel like a burden and instead simply helps customers recognize which businesses are willing to truly bond with them.

This development will be a particular boon for the small businesses as they lack the resources to build long-term campaigns to carve a bond with a portion of the market; it can also benefit large enterprises as they won’t need to make bold politicized moves to connect to a customer base. There’s an opportunity to conveniently give customers a share of the success derived from the value they bring to the table.

On a closing point, INFLEUM has taken the effort to ease the utilization of the smart contracts that entangle its PoI. The platform provides a simple drag-and-drop format for the development of smart contracts; this will ensure there is no barrier to entry into the utilization of its value additives.