Toby Shapshak: Pattern Recognition

communication can be a good thing.

Two weeks ago I was flying via Frankfurt on Lufthansa when I received an SMS message to notify me that the gate for my transfer flight had changed.

Similarly useful are those SMSes from my bank whenever I swipe my credit card. They’re invaluable.

But do I want that kind of messaging to invade what has become a deeply personal space on WhatsApp?

This raises the question: what kind of other marketing will we start to see on the feature-rich platform that is WhatsApp, where sending video messages and images is much easier given that such a social media app is designed to transmit these visual files in a way SMS was never designed to do?

If consumers are shifting towards instant messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, why can’t businesses do this, you might ask.

But that line of argument belies one of the reasons that WhatsApp and Messenger became useful in the first place: apart from costing less, they didn’t come with the “free-forall” attitude that has befallen SMS messages.

Worse still, you’re paying — with your data — for someone else to send you larger video files.

There’s another complication to the shift towards instant messaging apps: you need to be online.

The reason that Lufthansa SMS was so useful was because it arrived on my phone, which wasn’t connected to the Internet until I got to my hotel.

If that urgent, time-sensitive message had been sent to me via an app that needed an Internet connection to work, it would have been useless.

If WhatsApp introduces messaging from businesses, it should — at the very least — give its users the ability to control or filter what they see.