An article published by the student association I’m a part of, Inside Electronic Pipo, inspires this blog post. It’s a short article about WhatsApp, an iPhone and Android application that allows people to send messages to other users of the app for free.
WhatsApp is on the iTunes Store for €0,79 in France and is second in the “Most Sold” top 10 for paid apps in France and Canada. People use it to send texts to other smartphones for free and effectively replace traditional texting services, because it’s much cheaper.
WhatsApp is seen by some as something really new and innovative, but it’s actually a simple messenger service, like MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, AIM or even Skype… except its marketing strategy is different. Their value proposition is not to provide a “free online messaging service” but to provide “free texting” (roughly). Thus, WhatsApp provides exactly the same things as those services, but focuses on making it similar to texting (by using the device’s ID as identification instead of having a username, etc.) to offer something “different”. WhatsApp, and similar apps on the iTunes and Android Stores, are a great example of how a good marketing plan can make a product successful, even if it’s similar to current offer.