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Most crypto companies think PR equals announcements. New feature, new partnership, new chain, new listing. Press release, tweet thread, repeat. The best brands do something different. They build a narrative so strong that every announcement becomes news on its own.
Earlier this year I started a series of public marketing teardowns, auditing real crypto brands and writing down exactly how I'd run their marketing next quarter. Two of them show this idea really clearly.
What does "sell ownership, not hardware" mean for Tangem?
Tangem makes hardware wallets. The obvious marketing move is to compete with Ledger: better card, better price, better design.
My hot take: Tangem's biggest competitor isn't Ledger. It's every centralized exchange convincing people they don't need self-custody at all. So I wouldn't sell hardware wallets. I'd sell ownership.
A few of the ideas from that teardown:
- A live "Not Your Keys Index" tracking exchange failures, frozen funds, hacks and regulatory actions. Every exchange failure becomes a Tangem story.
- An industry Self-Custody Adoption Report, built with on-chain analytics firms. If you own the data, you own the narrative.
- Ask the uncomfortable question in public: why are hardware wallets still harder to use than Apple Pay?
- A blind setup challenge. Put real people in a room with three wallets, let them try each one, and publish what happens.
Notice that none of these is a product announcement. They're headlines a journalist would actually want, because they're about something bigger than the product. Tangem shouldn't be fighting Ledger for market share. It should be fighting the big exchanges for mindshare.
The full breakdown is in my Tangem marketing teardown.
Why should a prediction market sell foresight instead of trading?
Limitless is a prediction market. Most prediction markets market trading: odds, volume, incentives. I'd market foresight instead. Position it as the place where the future gets priced first, across crypto, finance, football, AI and politics.
That opens up stories no trading app can tell:
- Monthly "Prediction Markets vs Experts" reports showing where traders called it before the analysts and the polls.
- A newsjacking engine. Within 30 minutes of every big headline, show journalists what traders were predicting beforehand.
- Local stories, like what Indian crypto traders or UK football fans are predicting before a major event.
- A giant live "Future Board" at a big conference, where people place predictions and watch the odds move on a screen. Every journalist walking past gets the product instantly.
What was missing wasn't product updates. It was a hero narrative. More in my Limitless marketing teardown.
What is the pattern behind both teardowns?
In both cases, the shift is the same:
- Stop describing what the product is.
- Find the bigger idea it stands for. Ownership. Foresight.
- Build stories, data and moments around that idea.
- Let your announcements ride on top of it.
When you do this, a product update stops being "v2 is live" and becomes the next chapter in a story people already care about. If you want a way to plan that across a quarter, my quarterly communications plan template and narrative pillars guide are the next step. And if your community is already tuning out, read the signs of announcement fatigue.
How does this look in a real campaign?
This is the kind of thinking I bring into every PR campaign. You can see how it played out for a real launch in the MANTRA case study, where the story around the raise mattered more than the raise itself.
If you own the narrative, you don't have to fight for every headline. They start coming to you.
