WeChat’s global expansion has been a disaster

Photo credit: Sean Hickin.

WeChat, the messaging app that’s absolutely everywhere in China, once had global ambitions. It has “great potential to be popular internationally,” said an executive at the Chinese social media giant back in the fall of 2012.

The company didn’t just sit back and hope it would happen – it tried really, really hard.

By the summer of 2013, Tencent had signed up soccer star Lionel Messi to promote WeChat. He appeared in a series of online and TV ads, like this one in Brazil for Father’s Day:

There was no avoiding Messi. He popped up on huge billboards alongside the tagline “We love. We share. WeChat” – like this one in Hong Kong:

Lionel Messi’s WeChat billboard spotted in Hong Kong, July 2013. Photo credit: Engadget’s Richard Lai.

Messi was later that year joined by Brazilian youngster Neymar. With that big-hitting duo spreading the word around South America and across soccer-crazy Southeast Asia, WeChat employed different celebs for other markets it considered important, like India. Eyeing the hundreds of millions of Indian people who are shifting from flip phones to smartphones, the Chinese tech titan did the obvious Bollywood thing:

Parent company Tencent, one of China’s top web companies with a market value of US$197 billion, was clearly pushing hard so it could have its first overseas success. Aside from big-bucks ads, WeChat dispatched marketing teams to a few strategic countries and paid for Facebook ads to woo smartphone-toting youngsters around the world

WeChat soon added a bunch of new features for overseas users – ones already doing well among Chinese users, where the app is called “Weixin” – like social gaming and official brand accounts. While Tencent kept the app’s overseas feature-set slim compared to the hundreds of things it can do in China, the company made it clear it wanted WeChat to be different from the very simple WhatsApp. It wanted to give people convenient online messaging plus a choice of using a bunch of other fun things, like paying money to download more animated “sticker” packs that could be used to enliven conversations.

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