WeChat, the most popular Chinese IM tool, just had its 100 million users
in March 2012. It gained 50 million users within first lunch year without any
ads. Why it could be such successful in China?
Wechat is an IM tool that users can use it to send voice, images, and
texts, video, and everything we want to share in Digital Age. If we looked at 7
sources of Innovation, which are the unexpected, incongruities, process needs,
industry and market structure, demographics, changes in perception, and new
knowledge, we can see that Wechat caught some of these opportunities, and make
these opportunities into real.
Before Wechat, QQ dominated Chinese IM market. It owned 600 million
users based on the growing of past 10 years. However, with the growing pace of
people’s steps, and the eager of sharing whenever and wherever, QQ, which is a
pure typing IM cannot feed the need of convenience from customers. (Process
needs) At the same time, 3G and smart phone entered people’s lives. (New
knowledge) People didn’t need to sit in front of computer and chat with others
anymore. (Industry and market structure) Customers need a product that allows
them to chat while walking, eating, and driving, etc. Then Tencent Co. jumped
out and said: I had a new product which could satisfy all your needs and you
can chat by just pressing one button, then you could talk in time whoever,
whenever, and wherever. At the beginning, people still concerned about whether
it’s cost much data when sending voice. But soon they found that Wechat can
even save data compare to QQ since it costs only 2.4k/hr to run in the
background. (Incongruities) Wechat never stop innovation after success. Face to
the youth who want to make friends on IM, (Demographics) Wechat created a
function that people can shake their phones and then find the other people who
are shaking phones at the same time. As we know, communication need is always the
main need for human, and in modern society, people have less chance to go out
and social, then they have to communicate and make friends online. That’s why
the social media is so popular nowadays. Based on this fact, Wechat includes a
mini social media in it and people can share personal information and
interesting things through Wechat. This function attracts more people to make
friends on Wechat by shaking phones and search information.
Wechat recently cooperate with some Weibo (Chinese Twitter) famous accounts,
such as Collection of jokes. People can add these accounts to friends list and
they can receive push information from them. (e.l. they can receive three joke messages
each day through Wechat if they add Collection of jokes as friend) This
function gives Wechat more chances to earn income.
Although Wechat is successful in China, compare to QQ, it still has
less market share. And some people said they already tired of Wechat since it couldn’t
give us more creative functions. So innovation is still a big challenge in
front of Wechat.
Nan, I find your posts interesting because I automatically think something like Twitter is big in America, it must be everywhere, but you show here that there are totally different services in other countries battling for market shares. You also point out well that what the people want will drive the success of any given internet/social media type organization.
ReplyDeleteYeah~The interesting thing is that Chinese cannot use Facebook and Twitter due to the government forbidden. So there are Chinese Facebook(renren), and Chinese Twitter (weibo)in Chinese market, and maybe you also heard about QQ, which belong to the same company with wechat. They are so successful and popular in China, which have biggest population all around the world. Let's see how they'll enter world wild market in the future.
ReplyDeleteHey Nan,
ReplyDeleteI know this is stemming off the point of the post a bit, but why does the Chinese Govt regulate the use of Facebook and Twitter but have no problem allowing the Chinese people to use Weibo, QQ and WeChat?
-Brendan