If you are a smartphone user then you most certainly use an Instant Messaging application almost on a daily basis. However have you ever stopped to consider how messaging applications are able to achieve such mainstream acceptance despite having spent almost nothing on marketing? WhatsApp’s growth was purely organic, in a market that is as mature as Instant Messaging, this is definitely a phenomenon.
About a year ago WeChat was splashing out what I can only imagine were millions of Rands on marketing. I’ll admit they got me to download the app. And so did a fair amount of my contacts. But that was that. It ended there.
What can we learn about ourselves from this? WhatsApp did not do anything revolutionary, they did something so basic that we couldn’t help falling in-love with it. Thereby revolutionising the way we communicate.
The need to communicate is an ongoing and well understood need among all people; regardless of age, gender or occupation. With WhatsApp, for the first time we had a reliable, cost-effective, and frictionless medium to communicate. The very reason why some lambasted it, was the reason that the platform was so successful. By removing the friction which, (with reasonable thought) had been added to other IM applications.
Now WeChat seems to be positioning it’s self as a platform rather than just another application. Whereby other app developers will be able to launch their offerings. The said value proposition I imagine is that users need a single App to replace all their Apps, also that the developers can leverage off WeChat’s existing user base. I once again foresee some challenges with this.
1. Phone manufactures understand themselves as building platforms rather than full solutions, part of the reason why major OSes have an App-Store. By positioning themselves this way they are taking on markets like Google Play, a position that I think might quickly prove even harder to sustain.
2. Although WeChat may have achieved significant downloads as a result of their marketing campaigns, they do not seem to have managed to convert a decent portion of those into active users. So without a sizable amount of active users (who understand the value of the platform), the developers are once again left to wrestle with the challenge of Discoverability.
With that said, if WeChat did manage to gain market share as a Platform, one definite positive could be an easing of the native vs hybrid debate for the development community. But this can only been seen as a value add if indeed the WeChat market place was understood and accepted by a sizable share of users and developers.
In closing we have learnt about ourselves that we are driven firstly and mostly by function. Despite the on-going myth that consumers are driven by trends and “what is cool”. The rate at which both WhatsApp and WeChat have been downloaded, could be seen as a strong indicator that Network Effects, as they have previously been understood, are less significant for the modern user.
