What Brands Can Learn from Facebook's Great Unbundling
It's no secret that having a mobile strategy for your brand is just as important as other aspects of your business. This is no different for big brands like Facebook, as we can see by co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg's latest move for the $150 billion business.
Looking at how Facebook has gradually been acquiring more and more apps, it has become a way for its users to engage in various products. This "Great Unbundling" is a mobile strategy that creates a more single-purpose experience for users. From a top down perspective, there is the massive social network that sits at the top of the pyramid. Scaling down from that are other major apps like Instagram, and WhatsApp; while further down are Facebook's branded apps, such as Paper and Messenger.
Now the question is whether this was a smart business decision by Zuckerberg. He has already achieved global recognition and, let's be honest, Facebook isn't going anywhere. So why the switch-up? Ultimately, it gives the brand the competitive advantage of being in front of hundreds of millions of people, while still targeting specific segments of this huge social market. From pre-teen selfie aficionados to retired grandparents catching up with relatives, the social network doesn't exactly have a refined audience. Their household name and technical capabilities allow them to seamlessly disrupt the industry with these complementary apps.This shift of focus from desktop to mobile follows a trend that reveals 1 billion active users on mobile, and their desire for apps that allow them to perform a single task at a time - taking photos, messaging friends, reading news, etc. This is generally how life works; we have a different experience for each element of our daily lives, each bringing in something new and exciting. Businesses capable of this technology should definitely take note as Facebook teaches brands to refine their mobile targeting into simple platforms.While their large scale business does allow for the multiple channels, there are always creative ways to allow for an overall clean and uncluttered user experience. For Zuckerberg, by breaking a large, noisy platform into digestible bites, mobile users can have an easy-to-use user experience with Facebook, thus expanding and simplifying the business structure.What brand do you think is next to jump on the "unbundling" bandwagon? Tweet us @TECKpert to join the conversation.