By Delshad Irani & Shephali Bhatt
Her eyes shut still, she grapples around for the phone every morning. Then swipes to turn off the alarm and swipes some more to fire up apps — WhatsApp and Facebook, followed by Twitter and Instagram, in no particular order. They’re also the last things she sees before REM sleep. She is most millennials and Gen-Z, whose oldest members are barely 18. (If you do none of those things, then you are probably made of sterner stuff or are from another century or don’t own a smartphone. Take your pick.)
Social media has altered the very fabric of human interaction, be it social or for commerce, for better or worse. A well-established fact, that. Facebook has helped us stay connected and find distant friends to give them an opportunity to marvel at our daily musings, accomplishments, babies, pooches and exciting lives, in general. It is also responsible for a spike in personality disorders and unhappy marriages, according to a study by a British legal firm. Incessant scrolling on Facebook has forever reconfigured the anatomy of the human index finger. There are 55 million daily active users (DAU) on Facebook and 49 million on mobile in India. The number’s a tad higher globally — 936 million DAU. And then a little over a year ago the biggest social network on the planet acquired instant messaging app WhatsApp for a mad sum, $19 billion, if we’re being precise.
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WHATSAPP & FACEBOOK: A TALE OF TWO NETWORKS
We asked twenty-something Ruchika Sapehiya, senior producer, Ping Network, what she’d think if WhatsApp started letting advertisers advertise on the messaging service. “It won’t work. Because it’s too personal. It’s bad enough when I get bombarded by 100 photos from a furniture brand and have to block the user. Of course, if it doesn’t feel intrusive or a violation of my privacy that’s another matter.”
WhatsApp founder & CEO Jan Koum in a blog post titled ‘Why we don’t sell ads’ wrote: “Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen. Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.”
On the other hand, according to company sources, Facebook has two million active advertisers, up from one million a year and a half ago.
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Facebook, of course, has its own app called Facebook Messenger. However, WhatsApp, with its monthly active user base of 800 million (of which an estimated 10 per cent is in India) is the one app to rule them all. According to the company, the fastest growing markets are Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia. Besides stream of consciousness texting, over half a billion active users are sharing more than 700 million photos and 100 million videos every single day. WhatsApp’s arrival and subsequent proliferation has rung the death knell for traditional SMS and it’s only a matter of time before the dancing girl in the red dress, a popular WhatsApp emoji, does the polka on its grave. To make matters grimmer than Wilhelm for traditional forms of communication, not two months ago, WhatsAppers began calling each other via the app. Hell, its usage and scope are expanding way beyond our wildest expectations. For instance, recently a sub-inspector in Kanpur send his resignation via WhatsApp.
Says Ankita Chemburkar, senior writer, iContract, who, by her own admission, spends 16 of her 18 waking hours on Facebook and WhatsApp, scrolling and searching shareable content and chatting with multiple groups; “The last time I had a conversation via SMS was perhaps one or two months ago.” Says 27-year-old marketing professional, Mitali Bose, “WhatsApp is something I can’t do without. It’s the easiest way to stay in touch with people. Of course, I’ve stopped calling and talking to people for it’s easier to message and be done with it.” It’s highly unlikely people will give up on conventional chats altogether, though.
Today, WhatsApp and Facebook are the No.1 and No.2 Most Exciting Brands in this country, respectively. Keeping them company in the Top 10 are five other communication brands, ranging from mobile handset manufacturers to telecommunications — Vodafone, Airtel, Samsung, Apple and Idea. Add Google (at No.5) and its video platform, YouTube (at 11), and it’s clear that no longer are traditional brands, the doyens of FMCG or the cola companies, for instance, top of mind for large populations of upwardly mobile teens and twenty-somethings. But there’s only so much excitement detergents can lather up in our humdrum lives, really. Besides a direct comparison between WhatsApp and Dove or Pantene would be as unfair as excessive humidity on perm day. Furthermore, as Karthik Srinivasan, national head, Social@Ogilvy, points out, “Facebook is something you’re checking day in and day out. WhatsApp penetration in India is phenomenal. The app is predictable, reliable. What makes them exciting are actually the people on it. So the medium isn’t directly communicating to the end user.”
The fact is people do not see Facebook, WhatsApp and their ilk as brands and commodities. “It’s an intrinsic function of daily life, an extension of myself. People don’t perceive them the same way they do Pepsi or Airtel, for instance,” says Samyak Chakrabarty, chief youth marketer, DDB Mudra Group, “The excitement comes from continued utility and these platforms’ ability to constantly reinvent the product or aspects of it.” What traditional brands ought to take away is just that — constant reinvention of brand and product can be a virtue sometimes and not a marketing sin. Says Suman Srivastava, founder, Marketing Unplugged and chief strategy officer, FCB Ulka, “Earlier, there used to be this Levers’ Way of Advertising. While Unilever may have abandoned it decades ago, I see some brands are discovering it only now. Someone has to tell them all the dependence on regressive research is not going to work. Look at Facebook. The social media platform has been panned every time it’s tried to do something unpredictable. Like launching the IPO, for instance. And Facebook has been constantly proving its critics wrong.”
The bottomline is: Let necessity no longer be the mother of product or marketing innovation. Meanwhile, marketers would do well to come up with ways to seem less like a brand and more like a pal. Or Facebook friends.
Source:The Economic Times
Copyright © 2015, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
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