WeChat’s Business Strategy Case Study

WeChat is a free, cross-platform and instant messaging application developed by Tencent. It was first released in January 2011 and was one of the largest standalone messaging apps by monthly active users. As of may 2016, WeChat has over a billion created accounts, 700 million active users; with more than 70 million outside of China (as of December 2015). In 2016, WeChat reached 864 million active users.

Social impact:

Life changing: self-actualization, affiliation/belonging

Emotional: rewards me, fun/entertainment, provides access, attractiveness

Functional: simplifies, saves time, organizes, integrates, connects, reduces effort, avoids hassles, variety, informs

Advertising:

This approach generated money by sending promotional marketing messages from other businesses to customers. When you establish a for-profit company, one of the most critical aspects of your strategy is determining how to generate income. Many companies sell either products or services or a mix of the two. However, advertisers are frequently the source of the majority of all of the revenue for online businesses and media organizations. This is referred to as an ad-based income model.

Community-funded:

The critical resource in this business strategy is a community's intellect. Three distinct consumer groups comprise this multifaceted business model: believers, suppliers, and purchasers. First, believers join the online community platform and contribute to the production of goods by vendors. Second, buyers purchase these goods, which may be visual, aural, or literary in nature. Finally, believers may be purchasers or providers, and vice versa.

Conversational commerce:

It is a reference to the nexus between chat applications and business. That is the trend toward engaging with organizations through messaging and chat applications such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Talk, and WeChat, or via speech technologies like Amazon's Echo, allowing users to engage with businesses via voice commands.

Cross-selling:

Cross-selling is a business strategy in which additional services or goods are offered to the primary offering to attract new consumers and retain existing ones. Numerous businesses are increasingly diversifying their product lines with items that have little resemblance to their primary offerings. Walmart is one such example; they used to offer everything but food. They want their stores to function as one-stop shops. Thus, companies mitigate their reliance on particular items and increase overall sustainability by providing other goods and services.

Customer data:

It primarily offers free services to users, stores their personal information, and acts as a platform for users to interact with one another. Additional value is generated by gathering and processing consumer data in advantageous ways for internal use or transfer to interested third parties. Revenue is produced by either directly selling the data to outsiders or by leveraging it for internal reasons, such as increasing the efficacy of advertising. Thus, innovative, sustainable Big Data business models are as prevalent and desired as they are elusive (i.e., data is the new oil).

Channel aggregation:

Consolidating numerous distribution routes into one to achieve greater economic efficiency. A business model for internet commerce in which a company (that does not manufacture or warehouse any item) gathers (aggregates) information about products and services from many competing sources and displays it on its website. The firm's strength is in its power to create an 'environment' that attracts users to its website and develop a system that facilitates pricing and specification matching.

Digitization:

This pattern is based on the capacity to convert current goods or services into digital versions, which have several benefits over intangible products, including increased accessibility and speed of distribution. In an ideal world, the digitalization of a product or service would occur without compromising the consumer value proposition. In other words, efficiency and multiplication achieved via digitalization do not detract from the consumer's perceived value. Being digitally sustainable encompasses all aspects of sustaining the institutional framework for developing and maintaining digital objects and resources and ensuring their long-term survival.

Disruptive trends:

A disruptive technology supplants an existing technology and fundamentally alters an industry or a game-changing innovation that establishes an altogether new industry. Disruptive innovation is defined as an invention that shows a new market and value network and ultimately disrupts an established market and value network, replacing incumbent market-leading companies, products, and alliances.

eCommerce:

Electronic commerce, or e-commerce (alternatively spelled eCommerce), is a business model, or a subset of a larger business model, that allows a company or person to do business via an electronic network, usually the internet. As a result, customers gain from increased accessibility and convenience, while the business benefits from integrating sales and distribution with other internal operations. Electronic commerce is prevalent throughout all four main market segments: business to business, business to consumer, consumer to consumer, and consumer to business. Ecommerce may be used to sell almost any goods or service, from books and music to financial services and airline tickets.

Ecosystem:

A business ecosystem is a collection of related entities ? suppliers, distributors, customers, rivals, and government agencies ? collaborating and providing a particular product or service. The concept is that each entity in the ecosystem influences and is impacted by the others, resulting in an ever-changing connection. Therefore, each entity must be adaptive and flexible to live, much like a biological ecosystem. These connections are often backed by a shared technical platform and are based on the flow of information, resources, and artifacts in the software ecosystem.

Lean Start-up:

The Lean Start-up methodology is a scientific approach to developing and managing businesses that focuses on getting the desired product into consumers' hands as quickly as possible. The Lean Startup method coaches you on how to guide a startup?when to turn, when to persevere?and how to build a company with maximum acceleration. It is a guiding philosophy for new product development.

Location-based advertising:

Location-based advertising is predicated on the fact that we now take our phones with us everywhere we go. Additionally, most of us are content to share our location data with the different applications we use. This enables marketers to tailor their messaging to individuals depending on their current location. Instantaneously. Advertisers may deliver various messages to other individuals based on the location data obtained from their mobile devices.

Markets are conversations:

For professional services firms, the difference will be made by converting non-engaged customers into engaged customers. Product development will be obsolete. Customer relations and conversations will replace it. By sharing modular and beta products and services with your current and future customers, companies and their customers interact and collaborate in ongoing conversations. Not only will customers find and follow companies in online social networks, but it will also be the other way around as well.

Mobile first behavior:

It is intended to mean that as a company thinks about its website or its other digital means of communications, it should be thinking critically about the mobile experience and how customers and employees will interact with it from their many devices. The term is “mobile first,” and it is intended to mean that as a company thinks about its website or its other digital means of communications, it should be thinking critically about the mobile experience and how customers and employees will interact with it from their many devices.

On-demand economy:

The on-demand economy is described as economic activity generated by digital marketplaces that meet customer demand for products and services via quick access and accessible supply. The supply chain is managed via a highly efficient, intuitive digital mesh built on top of current infrastructure networks. The on-demand economy is transforming commercial behavior in cities worldwide. The number of businesses, the categories covered, and the industry's growth rate are all increasing. Businesses in this new economy are the culmination of years of technological progress and customer behavior change.

One-off experience:

The one-off experience business concept aims to facilitate the interaction between consumers in abundant marketplaces and their experience-seeking counterparts. This business model can only succeed if social media firms collaborate with physical event organizers, online pop-up shops, and e-commerce merchants. Developing software and participating in continuous dialogue with their consumers is insufficient. This business model provides consumers with unique experiences at a particular location during a specific event.

Online to Offline O2O:

Online to offline is a term (often abbreviated as O2O) used in digital marketing to refer to systems that entice customers to purchase products or services from physical companies while they are in a digital environment.

Open business:

Businesses use the open business approach to incorporate goods and services ecosystems from third parties that operate inside the same market framework. Collaboration between companies has the potential to increase the value delivered to the end customer or user. Software developers and platform integrators often use this business model.

Orchestrator:

Orchestrators are businesses that outsource a substantial portion of their operations and processes to third-party service providers or third-party vendors. The fundamental objective of this business strategy is to concentrate internal resources on core and essential functions while contracting out the remainder of the work to other businesses, thus reducing costs.

Peer to Peer (P2P):

A peer-to-peer, or P2P, service is a decentralized platform that enables two people to communicate directly, without the need for a third-party intermediary or the usage of a corporation providing a product or service. For example, the buyer and seller do business now via the P2P service. Certain peer-to-peer (P2P) services do not include economic transactions such as buying and selling but instead connect people to collaborate on projects, exchange information, and communicate without the need for an intermediary. The organizing business provides a point of contact for these people, often an online database and communication service. The renting of personal goods, the supply of particular products or services, or the exchange of knowledge and experiences are all examples of transactions.

Revenue sharing:

Revenue sharing occurs in various forms, but each iteration includes the sharing of operational gains or losses amongst connected financial players. Occasionally, revenue sharing is utilized as an incentive program ? for example, a small company owner may pay partners or colleagues a percentage-based commission for recommending new clients. Occasionally, revenue sharing is utilized to share the earnings generated by a corporate partnership.

Sharing economy:

The sharing economy eliminates the necessity for individual asset ownership. The phrase sharing economy is an umbrella word that encompasses various definitions and is often used to refer to economic and social activity that involves online transactions. Originally coined by the open-source community to refer to peer-to-peer sharing of access to goods and services, the term is now occasionally used more broadly to refer to any sales transaction conducted via online marketplaces, including those that are business to consumer (B2C) than peer-to-peer.

Tradeable currency:

This pattern involves the creation of a digital asset and the establishment of a payment mechanism. Through this, the user earns points that may be used for other services.

Trading data:

Combining disparate data sets enables businesses to develop a variety of new offerings for complementary companies. Robustness is a property that describes a model's, test's, or system's ability to perform effectively when its variables or assumptions are changed, ensuring that a robust concept operates without fail under various conditions. In general, robustness refers to a system's capacity to deal with unpredictability while remaining practical.

Transaction facilitator:

The business acts as an acquirer, processing payments on behalf of online merchants, auction sites, and other commercial users for a fee. This encompasses all elements of purchasing, selling, and exchanging currencies at current or predetermined exchange rates. By far the biggest market in the world in terms of trade volume. The largest multinational banks are the leading players in this industry. Around the globe, financial hubs serve as anchors for trade between a diverse range of various kinds of buyers and sellers 24 hours a day, save on weekends.

Two-sided market:

Two-sided marketplaces, also called two-sided networks, are commercial platforms featuring two different user groups that mutually profit from the web. A multi-sided platform is an organization that generates value mainly via the facilitation of direct contacts between two (or more) distinct kinds of connected consumers (MSP). A two-sided market enables interactions between many interdependent consumer groups. The platform's value grows as more groups or individual members of each group use it. For example, eBay is a marketplace that links buyers and sellers. Google connects advertising and searchers. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are also bidirectional, linking consumers and marketers.

Unlimited niches:

Online retailers provide specialized content to various niche client groups via continuing mass-customized customer relationships. The sector of technical content providers is a second client segment. Combining these two factors may result in an infinite number of niches. New material is produced and distributed through online channels, which implies that online retailers must prioritize platform maintenance and marketing in addition to service delivery.