Is UK comms ready for super apps that combine messaging, payments, shopping and more?

For communications professionals, gen Z is one of our most discussed audiences but also one of the hardest to reach.

It’s not that young people are difficult to find. They are constantly online: messaging friends, watching reels, discovering brands, joining communities, shopping, organising events and consuming news.

The problem is that they are doing all those things in different places.

Over the past decade, almost every new digital behaviour has generated yet another platform, feed, login and set of notifications. For consumers, this means constantly moving between apps. For communications teams, it has created an increasingly complicated ecosystem in which we are expected to parse the language, algorithms, formats and culture of numerous platforms simultaneously.

A campaign aimed at an 18-year-old might use TikTok for discovery, Instagram for visual storytelling, WhatsApp for conversation, YouTube for longer-form content and an event platform for participation.

Each individual platform works fine but the collective experience is defined by its fragmentation.

Perhaps, rather than finding ever more ingenious ways to navigate that lack of connectedness, it’s time we started simplifying things?

Will Brits fall in love with a super app?

For years the idea of the “super app” has largely been associated with Asia. WeChat is the obvious example: an ecosystem in which communication, payments, services and numerous everyday digital activities can take place without users constantly moving between separate applications.

The assumption has often been that the model could never translate to Britain, where consumers already have established relationships with highly successful specialist apps.

But the more interesting question is not whether people will abandon every app they currently use. It is whether we have reached the point at which constantly adding new ones no longer improves the digital experience.

There are signs that younger consumers are craving another approach.

Gen Z may be the first genuinely smartphone-native generation, but it’s coming at a high cost. A report published this month by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) thinktank found that the number of young people with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014.

It paints 11- to 24-year-olds in England as ‘the loneliest generation’, isolated and ‘disconnected’ from themselves, their peers and wider society.

And social media has had a large hand in this frightening societal shift.

Research ZYMIX conducted among a small group of gen Z consumers and creators at Henley Royal Regatta this summer found that while 90% spent more than two hours a day on social media, only 20% felt social media helped them feel connected in real life to a great extent.

It was a small sample, but it illustrates that important distinction that is dawning on all of us: being constantly connected online is not the same thing as real-world connection.

And this is particularly salient for us as communicators.

Understanding the distinction instinctively themselves, younger consumers are enthusiastically embracing experiences that move in the opposite direction to endless scrolling: running clubs, grassroots sport, live music, festivals, creator events and interest-based communities.

That should prompt us to reconsider one of the organising principles of social media comms.

Creating the communication connection

For much of the past decade, the question has been: how do we capture attention? How do we stop the scroll, win another click or keep somebody watching for another few seconds?

These metrics will still matter. But the next stage of digital communications will increasingly be about what happens after we have grabbed somebody’s attention.

Do they join a community? Start a conversation? Attend something? Make a recommendation? Discover something useful? Does the relationship extend beyond that first click?

In other words, we need to move from attention capture to connection creation. And I firmly believe the growth of more integrated digital ecosystems could accelerate that shift.

Bring communication, communities, events, discovery and payments closer together and everything changes. Instead of merely buying a few seconds in somebody’s feed, organisations can provide something useful within an existing social behaviour.

Changing the mindset of PR professionals

But the change requires a different mindset for communications professionals, too.

Brands will need to think less like advertisers occupying digital space and more like participants in communities. Relevance may become more valuable than sheer reach. And interactions will be rated by quality rather than volume.

Gen Z has spent its entire life surrounded by digital marketing and is highly practised at recognising when a brand simply wants a quick fix. The communications that stand out are the ones that impart value.

But the bigger change is not about any one platform.

The first era of consumer technology digitised individual parts of our lives. The next produced specialist apps for almost every one of those activities. The next phase ought to involve suturing these fragments back together.

The super-app era will be an exciting time to be working in communications. Instead of competing relentlessly for attention, it will encourage us to create meaningful connections between people, organisations and the communities they serve.

A shift that benefits everyone – now that really is super.

Nikita Sun, chief strategy and corporate affairs officer, ZYMIX.