By: Aerial Johnson
Case Study: Weixin
One of the first points you learn in marketing is knowing your target audience, their behavior and buying habits. To understand the customer is a key component in building an effective and strategic marketing strategy.As technology advances, so does consumer behavior.The technological and communication revolution arising from the social use of mobile devices has led to an increase in research on interactive communication, marketing and commercialization based on mobile devices. This post will highlight a mobile app, Weixin, a popular Chinese messaging app with over 1.1 billion accounts, The secret to Weixin’s success? The rise of the app’s popularity is its multifunctionality- making it appealing to fans of social media mobile users and businesses. With mobile marketing.
From a marketing perspective, the Weixin app is a stroke of genius. Tencent obviously did its homework to understand its users, their needs, online habits, and cultural considerations. Weixin got to know its audience and developed its app to fit into the lifestyles of its users, and affords those users the ability to set up the app according to their own personal preferences. At the same time, having an app so integrated into the lives of its users creates opportunity for creating a behavioral change, which can manifest in influencing purchasing decisions or initiating a social movement. Integrated into the app is all the data a marketing department would need do conduct an in-depth audience analysis.
Unexpected conclusion…
Weixin understood its users from a global standpoint into the user experience as they did with their campaign for Red Enevolpe. It’s an example of how knowing the audience can make a social media campaign successful. By generating excitement through using the app for monetary value, they also influenced user behavior by getting them to integrate their banking and money functions into the app. This ability to study and subsequently understand how to influence the audience is a lesson in marketing savvy. The company of state surveillance combined with the concentration of personal information, there is an uncomfortable aspect to a comprehensive product like this, both as a generator of personal information and as an online portal that can be manipulated to act as a filter.
As consumers move online, SMEs in retail, catering, tourism and logistics in particular have had to urgently pivot to e-commerce. Weixin’s rich ecosystem makes it easier by providing numerous digital tools and continuously upgrading its capabilities for SMEs to pivot their business online and find new markets.
The study recommends that digital ecologies should be expanded given their clear potential to provide stable and fulfilling employment and income opportunities. This should be done while developing mechanisms to protect workers in the growing digital economy.
Resources- -Yang, Z. (2022, October 18). WeChat users are begging Tencent to give their accounts back after talking about a Beijing protest. MIT Technology Review. Retrieved December 17, 2022, from https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/16/1061713/wechat-accounts-begging-tencent-beijing-protest/
Tencent draws a clearer line between international and Chinese wechat users. South China Morning Post. (2021, September 7). Retrieved December 17, 2022, from https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3147880/tencent-draws-line-between-wechat-and-weixin-telling-users-choose
How Weixin creates new jobs and extra income opportunities. How Weixin Creates New Jobs and Extra Income Opportunities – Tencent 腾讯. (n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2022, from https://www.tencent.com/en-us/articles/2201439.html
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