The WeChat Revolution

WeChat, We What?

It’s very possible that you have been asleep for the past year if the whole WeChat revolution has passed you by. Just in case you’ve been dozing off, WeChat is a social and messaging platform from China that has enjoyed meteoric success and consumer adoption in the past couple of years, now with around 400 million users. In very simplistic terms, think of it as a Chinese version of WhatsApp, but it goes way, way further in terms of the functionality and user experience it offers.

WeChat is packed with consumer goodies, ranging from the essential – peer chat, messaging, and location-based services – to the more gimmicky – emoticons, stickers, and the ability to set messages adrift for strangers to pick up.

More recently and importantly it has added in payment functions. It is also an example of the “Galapagos Islands Effect” that China has had on the Internet.

Galapagos Islands Effect

The Galapagos Islands not near China, no they are not, but this is a term that is used to describe how the Internet has developed in China. Due to the uniqueness of the legal, political, and cultural environment in China over the years, different Chinese versions of global platforms have emerged; think Baidu for Google, RenRen for Facebook, and Weibo for Twitter.

Often this is because the global platforms have simply been banned in China. To begin with, these were considered copies of their Western counterparts, but as we have seen with apps like WeChat, these “clones” are now going a lot further in their ambition and potential. Thus the Internet in China has evolved differently and uniquely to the rest of the world, catering to its own domestic needs and nuances.

So what worked in the rest of the world for online marketers does not necessarily work in China.

Who Uses WeChat?

A lot of people use WeChat – it’s immensely popular with China’s highly connected, young urban professional classes. With their higher average incomes and taste for branded consumer goods, WeChat users are a key target brands want to pursue, engage with, and build loyalty among.

Another thing that characterizes this group is that, by definition, they are smartphone users and they use their phones a lot! Last year, one-quarter of consumers were using their smartphones for more than four hours per day, providing that “always on” and close to real-time accessibility that other channels like email just cannot provide.

Everyone wants to connect with them and WeChat is an important way to do it.

Building WeChat Relationships

There are two approaches to engaging customers in a relationship with WeChat. Setting up a Subscription Account is more basic and allows more broadcast services that you would expect to see with Twitter type communication. This has its obvious limits from a relationship point of view and it is perhaps better to establish a Service Account that offers up the ability to deliver more personal, more targeted, and more custom propositions.

This personal approach is the key to making a presence on WeChat a success. Each brand needs to consider how best to address its own needs and those of its customers. Much of this might be your pretty standard (and static) Web content, but it is best to leverage WeChat’s full platform and mobile capability to provide functions that create a better and more compelling experience; location-based store locators, real-time interaction with products, peer sharing and collaboration, promotional and couponing, and ultimately completing sales transactions.

Arms Race With Alibaba

Late last year WeChat launched a payment platform, which threw down the gauntlet to Alibaba and its dominant payment platform in China, Alipay. The integration of payments with the relationship and a promotional dialogue is something that is fundamentally important for us all as these areas blur together on a consumer’s phone. Using  messaging, relationship-based customization, and immediate payment to drive sales quickly and seamlessly is the Holy Grail that we are all striving for.

Both WeChat (and its parent company Tencent) and Alipay are very well aware of this; hence the recent move from Alipay launching their own WeChat-like app, Laiwang. This arms race is one to watch and perhaps something to be revisited another time.

Get Started

It’s a bit late to be saying this, but consumer brands need to be on WeChat. Just like brands need to have a presence on Facebook outside of China, they need to have a presence on WeChat and need to be using it to engage and build customer relationships. But, also like on those other channels, brands don’t always get it right.

Some starters for using WeChat correctly:

• Do Your Homework: Understand your customer demographics and behavior; know how they behave online and on mobile.
• Establish Your Presence: Ensure that you get the basics right, replicating your Web content where you need to but also developing new and more differentiated propositions.
• Attract Followers: Using QR codes is popular and linking from all your other assets is important in getting the all important numbers up.
• Unique and Compelling: Develop more unique and compelling customer experiences that customers are going to love and want to share.
• Get Messaging: The broad reach of WeChat to get out to the masses is attractive, but consider how you are going to be targeted and customized with messaging with actions that keep people on platform.
• Be Responsible: Mobile messaging can get intrusive and annoying. Don’t betray your customers’ trust or upset the platform with indiscriminate messaging and spamming.
• Build a Dialogue: It’s a two-way platform for people to talk to each other and they are going to talk to you, so be prepared to offer great customer service – quickly!

Good luck and good marketing!