Shaping Strategy-Mini Program on WeChat

What impressed me most after reading Your Strategy Needs a Strategy is that the importance to select a proper strategy according to the situation you are facing. It is true that many industry factors will play into the strategy we actually formulate, however, we can narrow down decisions by considering just two critical factors: predictability and malleability. Then the author introduced four different strategies which label classical, adaptive, shaping and visionary. In addition, this article also briefly talks about how to avoid the traps while making decisions. As a digital product designer, I really into the novel products those high tech companies launched so I would like to talk about the shaping strategy in the Internet industry.

As I understand, “shaping strategy” aims to shape the unpredictable environment to its own advantage before someone else does. It can somehow lead the company to an advantageous situation while comparing with competitors. The author explains it with the example of Facebook, how it beats MySpace via building its own open community. It just reminds me of the “Mini Program” that Tencent did in the last two years. Mini Program is “sub-applications” within the WeChat ecosystem. It enables to provide advanced features to users such as e-commerce, coupons, task management etc. It is known to us that WeChat is the core product of Tencent, and it has already became a leader which owns the highest user traffic among other social media platforms, however, Tencent is not in the prominent position in other businesses. I believe Tencent is absolutely coveted to get market share in other services.

WeChat’s huge user traffic, and translate that into other offline services, is the ultimate competitive advantage. That’s why “Mini Program” was invented. I would like to explain it with a restaurant service mini program. If you are running a restaurant, you don't need to design and print the seasonal menu several times a year. You don't need to prepare an iPad for the guests. You only need a mini program. When customer come to your restaurant, they can just scan the QR code to order dishes, pay on the Mini Program and wrote reviews on it. You see, it is pretty convenient!

With the help of Mini Program, all kinds of offline service can easily build Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Users do not have to worry about the complexity of technical support framework and the high cost of building back-end server. The Mini Program looks simple but is a key to the goal of "Connecting Everything" which Tencent is always pursuing. It will absolutely consolidate WeChat’s dominance because all offline services can be connected through Mini Program.

In this case, Baidu’s advantage will be further weakened. And the gap between Alipay and WeChat will be wider in the future. By creating this flexible and popular platform, Tencent actively shaped the business environment to its own advantage and I truly believe it will have an enormous market prospect.