Mobile Marketing: How WeChat is the Swiss Army Knife of Mobile Phone Apps in China

If your plans don’t include mobile, your plans are not finished.

Wendy Clark

In this day and age, it would be hard to find a Millennial or Gen Z who does not own a smart device. In fact, there are over 2.7 billion smartphone users and 1.35 billion tablet users across the world. Like it or not, mobile apps have become part of our life, with the average person using around 25 apps per month, with a large majority of their time split between 10 apps.

When I think of apps, the first things that comes to my mind is utility, health, information/educational, convenience, shopping, messaging, social media, and entertainment. With an almost endless selection of apps available for download through the mobile app giants, Apple’s iOS App Store and Android’s Google Play Store, there is definitely revenue being generated especially with hybrid monetization models such as in-app ads and in-app purchases. I feel that mobile apps are a promising area that marketers should tap on to generate higher interest and profits.

There are many kinds of apps, with most of them filling one primary purpose. Examples would be entertainment apps such as Netflix and Minecraft Pocket Edition; both fulfill their primary purposes of providing streaming content and a video game experience respectively. Messenger apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Telegram provide the primary purpose of communication through instant messaging, chat groups, and media sharing. Personally, I feel that with each individual app fulfilling a single purpose poses a problem of bloating; there comes a point where consumers would be overwhelmed with the sheer number of apps installed on their devices. While I feel that this allows for a higher count of in-app advertisements and other marketing strategies across a variety of apps.

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent, a Chinese multinational conglomerate. WeChat addresses the app bloat issue by being a multipurpose app and has been described as China’s “app for everything” and a “super app” due to its wide range of functions. WeChat fulfills multiple purposes, such as messaging, media sharing, digital payment services, navigation, booking of services (such as movie tickets, flight and rail tickets, ride hailing), buying and rental of property, contacting customer support, among other features. With a user base of over 1 billion users, I feel that WeChat is a very lucrative marketing channel for companies in China, due to the Great Firewall of China blocking other social media platforms such as Facebook.

However, in reality, I believe it would be impossible to create a super app in the likes of WeChat outside China as most apps have high switching costs for consumers. The need to create a new account, re-fill out personal information and tweak settings may prove too daunting and troublesome for most consumers. I feel that a more realistic solution would be for large companies, to acquire smaller companies and in turn, obtain their mobile apps. An example of this would be Facebook acquiring 2 popular social media apps; Instagram and Whatsapp, and rebranding them as belonging under the Facebook umbrella.

With the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, Facebook has potentially redefined how billions of people use these apps to connect with one another inside the company’s ecosystem of apps. A good example would be the possible reduction of competition from rival messaging services, like those offered by Apple and Google. In my opinion, I feel that Facebook might also be able to increase its advertising business or add new revenue-generating services if users interact more frequently with Facebook’s apps, generating greater profits. Mark Zuckerberg believes in integrating the services of WhatsApp and Instagram will benefit the Facebook ‘family of apps’.

While the ‘swiss army knife’ of apps that is WeChat may not be achievable outside of China, do you feel that Facebook is taking the right steps to achieving an app coverage that may be comparable to WeChat, in terms of social media functions in the future? Do you feel that other large companies with the capacity to acquire similar companies with similar app functions may follow the Facebook route in the near future? As marketing students, do you feel that that in-app advertisements and other app-related marketing strategies may be easier to implement to yield greater exposure and profitability in a mega-app such as WeChat? Share your thoughts in the comments!