Jongla sends strong message to Facebook, WhatsApp in Nairobi

New messaging mobile application Jongla has launched in Kenya in a bid to challenge the market dominance of other established messaging apps by offering more messaging with less data use, in an ambitious marketing strategy that has worked in other sectors.

However, the onslaught will require significant differentiation to secure ground from existing leaders.

“Jongla is very economical in terms of data usage and the cost related to this. From download to daily use, Jongla saves people money,” said Riku Salminen, CEO of the Finnish company.

“According to our studies, Jongla uses 80 per cent less data compared to Viber and 25 per cent less data compared to Facebook Messenger when you use it. It makes all the difference for people living in countries where data is expensive.”

It’s a product character that is seeing Jongla specifically target Africa.

The application, which launched its social messenger last month, has also highlighted the need for a mobile messaging application that uses less memory space.

“It only takes 3.4MB to download on Android phones compared to WhatsApp (23.7MB), Facebook’s Messenger (30.2MB) and more than 20MB for most other messaging apps,” said Salminen.

By researching into the disadvantages of other mobile messaging applications (expensive data and large phone memory space), Jongla is presenting itself to consumers as an innovator among its competitors, as a marketing strategy for its product.

“For brands seeking to displace a dominate player, they need to carry out extensive research and find out in what advantage does the dominant player have over the rest of the competition, and in which areas they fall short,” said Odanga Madung, the data science lead at Odipo Dev, an analytics firm.

“Also, they need to find out what are the current dissatisfaction and satisfactions from consumers such that they are able to identity the opportunity that lies in the market.”

Search results

In Google’s case, they chose to focus on functionality so as to beat their competitors such as AltaVista, Lycos and Excite in the late 1990s, by creating a platform that provided relevant search results and loaded faster.

At the time, search engines contained a lot of text and advertisements on their homepages, thus took a lot of time to load.

They also relied on databases of textual keywords to find relevant results, such that whenever a user entered a search term, it would compare the search term to their databases of terms, according to an article titled The Rise of Google: Beating Yahoo at Its Own Game, on the technology website LowEndMac.

The pages that had text most similar to the search term were considered to be more relevant and were featured higher in the list of search results. Users also had to pay around $40 for the access.

But Google, in 1998, brought into the market a simple search engine that contained its logo and a search box minus the clutter found on other search engines on their home pages.

The founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created an algorithm to evaluate the relevance of certain pages by analysing the patterns formed by hyperlinks.

Thus, it loaded faster, whilst also offering relevant superior results.

Marketing tactic

By February of 1999, Google was handling 500,000 searches a day and by 2000, it had become the largest search engine in the world in terms of pages indexed. Today, it processes over 40,000 search queries every second.

However, it is not just new entrants to a market that turn to innovation in a bid to beat a dominant market player.

Companies that have lagged behind for years can chose to employ this marketing tactic as a way of getting a head of their competition.

An example of this is Tesco, now the UK’s largest retailer by sales, at £64.4m in 2014, compared to its closest competitor Sainsbury’s with £25.6m sales, according to Retail Economics, where twenty years earlier, Sainsbury’s completely dominated the market.

The Tesco dominance began in 1995 when it overtook Sainsbury’s as Britain’s biggest food retailer, according to a BBC Business article titled Stores at war: winning secrets.

Tesco employed tactics such as launching its range of own-label economy lines to give shoppers the chance to save money on basics, taking on designer brands such as Levi’s and Nike, and offering their products at cut prices. It also reduced the pricing of more than 300 goods.

By the end of 1998, the Institute of Grocery Distribution, stated that Tesco had a 15.4 per cent market share of the grocery market, up from a share of 9.7 per cent in 1990, while its main competitor Sainsbury’s share was 12.2 per cent.

But as much as innovation plays an important role in destabilising market dominance, it is not the only factor.

“Innovation is not always the best possible solution for a company looking to beat a dominant player, especially in a crowded market: a good distribution network is also needed,” said Odanga.

“Make the product accessible to the consumers because if they cannot access it, then there is a high chance that it will not make an impact in the market, thus it will fade away.”

-African Laughter