TMT(TECH MEDIA AND TELCO) DIGEST | APP MARKETING
Trending: Super Apps ↗️
Apps have become a part of our daily lives. There is an app for everything. Asian markets have been leaders in this space. To name a few, Alibaba and WeChat in Chinese markets, Paytm and Tata Neu in India, and GoJek in Indonesia. But for some reason, the west has been laggards at it. Despite companies having the ecosystem, they have always seemed to shy away from this strategy. The Walt Disney Company has Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN as three separate streaming platforms, unlike all being on one platform. Though this may not be a super app in the true sense but needs the basic level of integration between all its parties. Today we need to share our Personal Information in 3 separate apps with the same company. It is not only inconvenient for the end-user but also increases the risk of cyber attacks with data shared across multiple platforms and multiple databases. Meta(formerly Facebook) also has something similar. It owns Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, and Oculus. Each of these apps has started to look more and more similar but for some reason, they cannot have one platform/interface to get into. The only true example that has glimpses of a super app in the west is Uber. It gives you the option to book a ride, order food, in some places even book your flights.
What are Super Apps
Apps started as a standalone applications that you would download from your respective app store. They complete one task efficiently. Super Apps on the other hand bring the ecosystem closer to the end-user. For Eg: If you want to order food online, who else in the ecosystem can complement the task of ordering food — probably with food or after food you would want to watch a movie and after food and movie maybe you may read a book and then plan to fall asleep. This nighttime routine typically would need a total of 4 apps — one app to order food, one app to stream/rent movies like Netflix, Kindle to read an ebook, and finally a sleep tracker app. A super app would allow you to do all this through one app. It may even allow you to set timed routines and trigger notifications to push you to take such actions.
Super Apps is the next phase of app development with an effort toward consolidation of major activities through one app. Bringing the cluster of ecosystem apps together will not only lead to better visibility and discovery of them but also drive increased adoption.
Are Super Apps coming to the West?
Barriers to Super Apps in the west
In Asia, there are still huge conglomerates that are increasing the population of Super Apps. But in the west both US and European governments have been building laws against monopolies against the Big Tech. There is no doubt that the U.S companies haven’t observed the benefits of Super App and are also looking for a piece of the pie. Many big tech giants have already started consolidating their services.
US Companies are behind but hungry for more
Super App innovations have been coming to the west for quite some time now. But lately, there is increasing evidence of companies trying to build their version of super apps.
Meta/Facebook is launching Metaverse which would be an App Store version of AR/VR apps. Meta already has WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Oculus. This Metaverse App Store will give them a chance to compete with Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store.
Creator’s economy due to increased monetization of their work through social platforms is paving way for social media to acquire payment processing platforms.
Nailing “payment processing” would be key to success — Scott Galloway in his podcast “Prof G”
Rather than building separate apps, Spotify used its music streaming platform to integrate its new podcast service into one app, unlike Apple which has separate apps for podcasts and Music.
Uber is also trying to become a Super App. Uber has the following components which strongly indicates that they may get there first.
- Uber ride — Provides ride-hailing and sharing services
- Uber Eats — Provides Food delivery Services and recently with its acquisition of Postmates they doubled down on this capability
- Uber Transit — Provides mobility ticketing
- Uber Money and Uber Wallet — Offer financial services to Uber drivers
- Patnership with CityScooy — CityScoot is a micro-mobility company in France that allows ordering scooters directly from the App.
What does this mean for Marketing?
Super Apps have the potential to change mobile marketing. It provides an opportunity for smaller companies to enter the app market. But the success metrics need to be redefined to measure the growth of the app.
Success Metrics
With Super Apps, success metrics will no longer be limited to customer acquisition. Downloading and installing the app will no longer be the first step toward conversion. They will need to identify a way to measure the number of active users on their app at a given point in time. Very similar to how we measure engagement rate on a website. Just like acquisition, the customer churn rate will also become obsolete as people who don’t like the app may not uninstall it anymore, because they may be other apps within the realm of the super app which they are still using.
Customer Privacy
With a cookie-less world, Apple bringing in new restrictions, Super Apps will be an ideal approach to Customer privacy as the users will need to share the data only once on one platform. Their likely hood of dropping out from marketing permission drastically reduces. In addition to that, from a user standpoint, since the data is saved only once, it reduces the surface area of attack and protects from data-privacy breaches and cyber threats.
Mobile Advertising
Advertising on Super Apps will be restricted to products only in the Super-App. This will further strengthen the security aspect but also restrict advertising on other external platforms/applications. The advertising is also more personalized as the user pattern and user behavior on the super apps are well-known and hence efficiently targetted.
Super Apps are emerging to be a disrupter in mobile app landscape. Its high time to start incorporating them in your product and marketing strategy. Would love to hear and understand from you how its shaping your businesses.
