China's Mega-App As a Storytelling Medium: Using WeChat as a research tool to empower consumer-centred insight

This paper argues that the influential and widely used Chinese app, WeChat, has created a distinct national digital mindset, specifically representing a unique narrative form that can be leveraged to gain more spontaneous and unmediated responses from Chinese consumers.

China's Mega-App As a Storytelling Medium: Using WeChat as a research tool to empower consumer-centred insight

Jerry Clode

Preface

The widespread use of the phone app WeChat by Chinese consumers has created a unique form of digital communication in China. Psychologically, WeChat use has created a unique Chinese digital subjectivity - a WeChat behavioural mindset.

Motivated to address cultural assumptions inherent in Western research approaches, we view WeChat as an intuitive context for Chinese consumers to tell their own stories, in their own way. The paper argues that WeChat communication represents a specific narrative form that can be leveraged to...

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