Starbucks and Tencent Holdings Ltd., a leading provider of internet value-added services in China, have announced a strategic partnership to create a new social gifting feature on Tencent’s WeChat in early 2017. Starbucks said in a press release that the partnership positions it as the first retail brand to combine with WeChat in China in order to bring a locally relevant social gifting and digital payment experience to users.
In my option, Mobile payment is not just a way for users to pay merchants. It is also a way for merchants to promote their goods through gift advertisement. Wechat incorporate both the social network features and payment features together so that users can use apps in one place for multiple purpose. Starbucks can benefit this partnership with Wechat to obtain more customers with more direct advertising through social gifting.
https://www.mobilepaymentstoday.com/news/starbucks-gifting-comes-to-wechat-users-in-china/
Implementing Starbucks gifting in WeChat users in China is a cool idea, but it is something I would never use. I understand that it helps spread Starbucks by introducing this feature into the user base of another application however, I do not see Starbucks and WeChat spreading this feature into other demographic areas. Starbucks can definitely just implement this feature within their own app, but their user base is probably just a fraction of the amount of consumers who go to Starbucks.