Brand it on chat

In China, a father checks plans for his daughters to travel home for their mother’s birthday by messaging them on WeChat — and in another chat window, starts a conversation with the China Railway Corporation to book the tickets. He then sends them the confirmation via WeChat, all within the space of a couple of minutes. In Japan, a young man gets a LINE message from a friend telling him that Lawson grocery is offering coupons on his favourite brand of tea. He adds Lawson as a friend on LINE, and is stocking up at his local store that evening.

Market research major TNS Global, in a study titled How Can Brands Join the Chat App Conversation points out that WeChat, LINE and South Korea’s Kakao Talk originally grew out of the WhatsApp chat app model in 2011. However, these Asian apps were not content sticking to the simple consumer-to-consumer chatting functionality that characterised WhatsApp. They quickly diversified the activities that people could perform, integrating m-commerce, gaming, content delivery and payment. One of the critical functionalities they added was the brand account, which allowed a brand to “chat” with a user — an experience that’s exactly like texting a friend. Now these apps are in turn being used as the inspiration for Facebook Messenger’s chat bot evolution.

According to TNS’s latest Connected Life data, chat apps are now the single most popular online activity, with 61 per cent of the Asian online audience using a chat app every day and a 12 per cent year-on-year increase in IM activity globally.

In Asia, chat apps have positioned themselves as destination apps by taking on more and more functions and also use chat apps to deliver tailored content to users. However, as the study warns, the consumer experience can go downhill very fast as brands compete for a share of your chat window. Content delivery through chat can easily descend into the same spam-riddled experience that email marketing reduces inboxes to.

WeChat has skirted this by creating a “Subscriptions” tab specifically for content delivery accounts, whilst LINE limits the frequency of posts a brand can make through its chat account. Keeping these lessons in mind, Facebook Messenger lets users block official chat accounts, a blunt measure that allows no recourse or chance of re-engagement unless initiated by the user. This will be a test for brands moving onto Facebook Messenger as they will need to judge their audience carefully — and walk a tightrope between being too boring and over-zealous. Get it right and they will tap into a new type of consumer dialogue; get it wrong and they will be blocked — quite possibly for good.

The action in India In India, though chat apps are a fairly recent phenomenon there have been certain instances of Bollywood using them for promoting films. For example, there were exclusive stickers on LINE for Dhoom3 and Krrish3 . Then fast food brands such as Nike, McDonalds, Domino’s and Burger King have used WeChat to engage with the users in the past.

Then there is the case of Lybrate, a start-up in the medical consulting space, where patients can directly consult with more than one lakh doctors across the country, and Jugnoo, an auto-rickshaw booking app that allows users to directly book the ride from within Facebook Messenger.

One of the campaigns that SAB Miller did for Vh1 Supersonic Arcade was hosting exclusive contest on WhatsApp to create a build-up for the event. Participants were asked to hum their favourite Above & Beyond songs and share it on WhatsApp using its audio recording feature, to show their love for the band. Maybelline New York India used the medium to call for entries for its campaign #SwipeToSpice to create a crowdsourced campaign.

In the apparel space, Jashn Sarees uses Whatsapp Platform to answer immediate queries on pricing and complaints. In this strategy, complaints get pulled off from social media to a personal space.

The TNS Global study points out that WeChat experiments with artificial intelligence (AI) include Xiaobing, a “virtual girlfriend” created by Microsoft.

Xiaobing is immensely popular in China, but its potential remains unharnessed by brands there. Facebook Messenger is giving AI a commercial purpose by using it to power its brand chat bots.

This has huge potential for improving personalised customer service by delivering on the true promise of brand chat — a human-like, one-to-one interaction that can be just like talking to a customer service person, but in truth can be scaled up to millions of simultaneous, asynchronous conversations.