Growth vs. Consistency: Even Snapchat can’t escape this widespread challenge
Snapchat, Facebook, Vice, you name it. These platforms are, or will soon be, facing the same challenge every major media brands have encountered over the last decades: brand consistency on their growth path. We say media platforms just as much as we could name brands of all kind. At some point, growth is synonym of: 1/ targetting different population segments and therefore adapting the product(s) to this incremental audience; 2/ as well as embracing market evolutions (new formats, new services, new talents, etc.). Both are potential UX disruptors and lots of companies have lost their soul on this journey. Beyond the fading hype.
With every positive news come challenges. The trigger this time? Snapchat developments over the last weeks. As much as some discussions with Vice executives over the last months.
Snapchat is now close to deliver 10 billion video views daily and it has keeps announcing series of new developments on the platform making it a all-in-one solution. The last is impacting the discovery page. Before that, the update included the “chat 2.0”, which allows users Facetime with friends, as well as send an audio note, text or sticker. We also found “Auto-Advance Stories”, a new feature allowing you to quickly move from story to story, as the next one begins automatically when you finish looking at the current message (do you remember Facebook’s autoplay?).
By developing all these new features, Snapchat is definitely opening the door to a larger audience currently focused on other messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger. But going forward how will it fit with Snapchat’s reputation for under-the-radar experiences designed for the in-crowd. Obscurity is an integral part of the UX design which attracts young, digitally-savvy users.
A tricky but interesting parallel has to be made with the current brand expansion of Vice. From its original (Vice) brand, the company has acquired and/or developed many vertical labels, from Noisey (music) to Munchies (food). And it keeps reinforcing this development with additional investments in travel and fashion for example. How can they do that? because the Vice brand is above all attached to their “authentic and unvarnished stories” rather than a specific industry vertical or format. But challenge will soon be (if not already) how to orchestrate the mother brand with these new ones, all being relevant cross platform while only developing Vice-branded applications, and facing strong and agile vertical-focused solutions (Vice’s Munchies vs. the independent Tastemade).
Consequently, developing new features and sub-brands, media platforms are stretching their own brand. What is the limit? No idea. It might for sure be dictated by some form of lobbying for revenues (profits) generation as much as relevant design thinking. It participates to the platform and format convergence. Other companies, such as Facebook (from Facebook to Messenger, through Notify and the soon to be Oculus distribution platform), Apple (multi device hook) and Amazon (Prime membership) have developed a multi-platform but integrated experience (or in the process of being so).
It all comes back to the adoption of a relevant and consistent tone, which can be expanded to the full UX design. It tends to be the similar conversation you could have today with some top social influencers expanding on each and every social platforms (from YouTube or Vine to Facebook and Snapchat) to reach and engage with their audience. A unique tone allow them to attract millions of daily viewers but some of them also perfect the cross platform expansion of this content. But is Facebook another format vs Vine or just the money-making platform for these talents? What’s gonna be the limit of new consumer generations with these “media brands”?
In this era of content surplus, which more and more resembles a bubble, creators, consumers, and brands all face one central issue: visibility. User-driven design has become instrumental in making content visible and engaging by structuring the interaction with IP. The interface is the central touchpoint for the consumer.
