#025 Fast Food vs Haute Cuisine?

Dear readers,

this days I got asked about the difference between OTTs (like Whatsapp) and RCS Business Messaging often. So I will share with you my personal view in a nutshell.

To me it′s like Fast Food vs Haute Cuisine. Both have a right to exist and depends on someones (Brands) preferences, appetite and scope you can choose the one or the other.

I tried to compare the one with the other to show Pro & Con in the table below. Resume: if you want to have more flexibility, flavors and differentiation you should aim for Haute Cuisine. New experiences will help to develop you any further and differentiate from the competition.

If you just want to go with the mass and standard is way enough to get with low budget/ ressources, you are good to go with Fast Food.

Maybe this is a helpful allegory to show the differences between the one and the other. That also shows why we always say RCS is not SMS when it comes to known behaviors, it also isn′t a one-stop-shop and simple scaling but as it is more a local game to play anyway when you look at the marketing spendings of big brands and markt specific behaviors and requirements, it′s not that bad. Furthermore there is no dependency from one single provider than splitting the "risk" with several responsible players like the local MNO of a country. And there is much more need for enablers to cover that complexity and add value to the product like offering a message composer / campaign builder etc.; More flexibility in features & functions as well as billing models will help to differentiate from the mass and build much more successful campaigns that lead to better KPIs what will satisfy any purchaser aka Brand.

For sure it′s not black and white, so there are already solutions out there to cover the long tail and much more to come, but to me the quintessence stays, if you are looking for new flavor, more flexibility, better results, native reach (that is already above any OTT player in GER), go RCS. If you need some help or further explanation, check www.rcsbusinessmessaging.de/en

As shown by seven.io the RCS % they face today with their doctor appointment agent MedDialog.de is already close to 80% and the user base is still growing with every handset change, software update and message app switch (Samsung to Google).

In sum we hit the 50m user benchmark these days of RCS reachable user in GER, what is above 44m Whatsapp user and not a doctored mileage than unique active user seen today in our networks. As Statista is saying there are 68.5m smartphone user in GER, we continue working on enabling most of them to be able to receive and send RCS messages via their native messaging inbox to not need any (insecure) third party app anymore. And yes, there are still optimizations to make and e.g. E2EE between iOS and Android to implement, but hey, it′s underway, we just have started... stay tuned what′s next :-)

PS: to stay in the allegory - there are already more people to win with Haute Cuisine than with Fast Food ;-)

Yours, #B