Parallel universes

There are certain tribes, services and indeed countries with which you are not going to engage easily or naturally. On a recent trip to China, I was put under mild pressure to download and install WeChat. It’s an app that’s all too easily dismissed as being a bit like WhatsApp. Mixed with Paypal. And Instagram… and an Oyster card, and email. WeChat has ridden the wave of rapid smartphone adoption in China, grabbing markets that in the West are completely separate and making the Chinese into full-time online addicts. People can pay for a packet of chewing gum with WeChat – or even buy a Volkswagen. They sling messages about constantly, browse things to buy… everything is subsumed into the one application.

Eventually, I got cold feet and deinstalled the app, mostly because all the interesting stuff looked to be limited to those who have a Chinese bank account. But not before realising that pretty much everyone I saw in offices, factories and shopping malls was a devoted WeChat user.

Finding out that your business can’t compete without access to a parallel universe such as this comes as quite a shock because you will need to investigate the whole society before figuring out what the cost of entry is likely to be to such a platform. If apps become tied to bank accounts, the access costs can be in the tens of thousands range – not every country makes their banking systems open and accessible. This type of painful on-boarding process argues for only big players crossing a boundary as high as this, and is likely to be much more of a realistic barrier to ecommerce and reputation management than any amount of politically motivated trade humbug.