Mini program, maxi disruption

If you are planning your first business trip to China, let me recommend something: leave your business card at home. You won’t impress your Chinese business partners with handmade paper and golden edge typos, for sure. Instead of this, you should amaze them with your own WeChat company profile for your digital networking.
WeChat — never heard? Exactly that is what your Chinese opposite might anticipate. Over 800 million Chinese are daily users of Tencent’s instant messaging service. But contrary to WhatsApp and the Facebook messenger, WeChat (微信, Pinyin Wēixìn “small message”) is almost unknown in the rest of the world, despite it offers all common language versions. But I would not be surprised if this changes drastically in the upcoming years.
Share & Pay: New requirements for mobile communications
“WeChat is not just another way to share texts, emojis and videos with other people — no one needs that anymore. It’s a real ‘game changer’, because it offers a lot of additional services, which are automatically combined with an integrated payment function”, explains Yier Erin Bargeld. The serial entrepreneur and financial investor is closely linked to the Chinese digital economy as a business angel and knows what expectations the users place on online services: “The bargains of the shopping tour, the fast bite at the snack bar or the taxi ride: Chinese people pay nearly every service in daily life via WeChat, also their phone and electricity bills. WeChat Pay, the in-house mobile payment system, connects the users via bank card with above 300,000 offline retailers.” Of course, you can literally embed a shop into your messages or status updates so that your entire social and business circle can immediately view, share, and purchase inside the same app.
The application has also captured other everyday areas. You like to book appointments with your doctor or with business partner via voice control? Do you like to get your driving licenses via mobile devices? With WeChat apps, it’s just as self-evident as the job search or the pastime with online games.
The super app: mini program (小程序)
Although, “app” is actually the wrong term. Because WeChat’s technological clue is to start the end of the app age: the western model of smartphone usage follows the principle of many different apps, that are pooled under the brand roof of a certain device. In contrast, WeChat bundles as many activities as possible from consumers with their own small programs in their own data universe — no matter which device they’re using. And it expands to Europe: Tencent has revealed in April that WeChat will be coming to the UK, France and Germany in the not too distant future. They will be opening up their ecommerce platform and payments services to European merchants to sell to shoppers in China. At the moment, Tencent is already managing roughly one million transactions per minute within the platform.
Furthermore, with the market launch of the “mini program” (小程序) function at the beginning of this year, this was expanded towards B2B business with a “super app”.
“Instead of developing native apps for the relevant operating systems, companies can use this innovation to create Webapps with WeChat integration,” explains Erin. “The borders that many Europeans still draw between their private and professional digital life doesn’t exist in China any more. Corporate websites with WeChat integration are an absolute ‘must-have’ in online communications. “
In addition, Chinese companies already bundle their most important activities in marketing, sales and e-commerce through their WeChat Official Account, since more than 800 million potential customers are already directly connected. All you want to do in offline marketing should therefore be coordinated with the online universe of WeChat via mobile marketing. And if one or the other language barrier should come up, a very popular Chinese translation program might be a good help — I guess you know where you find it, right?
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