WhatsApp’s amazing growth, perils of digitising everything, and rebuilding design

A weekly round-up—3 discoveries, 1 reflection and a quote worth remembering in the innovation & design space—for leaders invested in digital transformation.

By Maish Nichani

External happenings

How WhatsApp became the world’s default communication app

The article presents a timeline of WhatsApp's road to becoming an “unregulated utility” that runs the world. What I find fascinating is that the monetisation model came a long way down the road when certain attributes became available.

“Meta has now begun using WhatsApp’s sheer scale to generate revenue, although it’s unclear so far how much money, if any, the app makes. “The business model we’re really excited about and one that we’ve been growing for a couple of years successfully is helping people talk to businesses on WhatsApp,” Cathcart said. “That’s a great experience.” Meta monetizes WhatsApp by charging large businesses to integrate the platform directly into existing systems they use to manage interactions with customers. And it integrates the whole system with Facebook, allowing businesses to place ads on Facebook that, when clicked, open directly to a WhatsApp chat with the business. These have become the fastest-growing ad format across Meta, the company told?The New York Times.”

If you follow the timeline, surely they could not have predicted that WhatsApp would have deep connections to Facebook and would have business functions like message management and calling. If they could not have planned the business model out, the only other answer is that it was emergent - it just turned up when certain favourable factors surfaced. Kudos to Meta for not forcing an unsustainable model and waiting for the right one to emerge.

The danger of digitising everything

Earlier this year, I travelled with my elderly parents to attend a wedding. I did not notice it initially, but QR codes were everywhere, from browsing menus to paying for stuff. Although my parents had smartphones, navigating QR codes was out of the question. In India, this does not come across as a problem, as my parents always have someone with them, but I worry about the children and their constant smartphone use. As Naomi Alderman points out, the gap is only getting bigger:

???“In all cases, many people—some elderly, others with access needs, children, anyone who just doesn’t fancy constantly looking at their phone—will be pushed toward more useless screen time and away from the kind of brief, friendly interactions with other humans that help us all feel part of the fabric of life. We’ll have reached the point of overdigitisation.”

Let's rebuild the damned thing

Lou Rosenfeld, publisher of Rosenfeld Media books, passionately pleads that we stop navel-gazing about the different design disciplines and accept that the current ways are not working. Wow! I have also voiced on multiple occasions that the bucketing of design disciplines—product design, content design, UX design, UI design, etc. — is not working, and all that clients want is to help them untangle or unlock growth opportunities. Focusing on outcomes over outputs has always worked. I have started writing articles to address the lack of business thinking in design. The first in the series addresses ‘business growth’ and should be published next week.

Internal reflections

We have a new Marketing Specialist at PebbleRoad! Meet Yan Ting Sim. She has previously worked with DBS, Gojek, and Tech in Asia. She will add to Bridgette See's good work. I look forward to working with Yan Ting to streamline our positioning and messaging.

Quote worth remembering

“The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what's already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.”

— Al Reis in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind