• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, March 14, 2015

You read that right. You don’t need to be the hip young brand like Skullcancy to leverage the messaging app world. Although Skullcandy is on our “Excuse Me!: Do Marketers And Chat Really Blend?” one of the most aggressive brands on WeChat in China is Mary Kay. In fact, that messaging app is miles ahead of many Western-based apps in letting brands into the experience.

Paul Jones, VP, Marketing and Digital Mary Kay, explains that the cosmetics brand is using the enormous installed base of WeChat in China to connect with the million individual sales consultants who make up their sales force. “We fish where the fish are,” he says.

But the key thing is that WeChat lets the messaging app connect deeply into the back end enterprise system at Mary Kay so the brand can actually let about a half dozen apps of its own live within WeChat. They have apps that tie the consultants to product sales, promotional programs, messaging and recruiting. He showed us how the apps look and feel as if they are in WeChat but are actually living on Mary Kay’s servers. In other words, you can use a one to one consumer messaging app to speak directly in b2b fashion with your own sales force.

How can they do that? WeChat has an installed base of 600 million.