Temu is sweeping the world right now with their insanely cheap prices, generous rewards schemes and flashy advertising. News are shocked trying to figure out how this company became the fastest growing shopping app in the US basically overnight beating Amazon, Wish and all their other competitors.
Temu marketing messaging
“Shop like a billionaire” is Temu’s tagline. Prices so cheap that you feel almost rich. They define themself as a quality product marketplace and they emphasise this message in their marketing campaigns and through their army of zombies “Influencers” who have no idea how bad the situation is in this company.
Temu Business model
Temu connects customers directly with Chinese manufactories and distributers cutting costs on middle men and resellers of any kind. But wait, doesn’t this sound familiar? Yes! It is the same model of the new era of shopping and Amazon and Wish have the same business model as Temu! So, why Temu is exploding in popularity? What is its competitive advantage? How can it afford to lower prices lik that beating the general market ask?
Temu marketing and advertisement
It all started with the famous super ball advertisement that now got more than 800million views on YouTube (they reposted the same one a month ago for the algorithm) a horrific showcase on people addiction on things. After that the influencer started being paid to endorse the app like Jason Derulo and JuJu (who, by the way, would never shop at Temu LOL). Temu targeted even small to medium influencers mainly on Instagram sending free packages just for exposure to their audience. Needless to say these campaigns were extremely successful.
Why Temu is evil and scammy in nature
Temu is operating a pyramid scheme on top of all its marketing campaign, pushing you to get your friends to sign up to get free random stuff gamifying the act of shopping like a gambling app that hooks addicted people. Yes, shopping can be an addiction. Compulsive spending is a serious mental condition that afflicts many people (women in particular). Needless to say the app exploded and their bottom line reach billions in few months.
Who owns Temu?
Temu is a partner company from the Chinese app called “PinDuoDuo” one of the most hated and controversial shopping app in Asia. Many customers found unspeakable things in their parcels and complain about its quality all the time. The employees are the main whistle blowers on how this company exploit its workforce all the time.
Data theft is the main concern for authorities, who have found out that PinDuoDuo and Temu can use your device front and back camera even when you actually are not using it to take a picture of an item you want to return. Saving your copied text from your clipboard. Accessing to all your picture, geo locating you, recording your conversations and more.
Despite these companies are public and trading in the stock market, they are not. The Chinese government is the main investor and the first to benefit from the data harvesting app that Temu and PinDuoDuo are. They used them to collect as many data as possible about their population, and now they are taking others. This is a global threat as they would now our spending behaviour and they would infiltrate in our lives.
The US government is already taking action banning apps like TikTok (another Chinese spy app) for governmental employees, while India banned it and other country are following after some revealing news about the data treatment of the users. Billions of users use Temu, TikTok combined, being both apps the fastest growing apps in history.
Conclusion
It is really up to the user to understand this data tradeoff. sell your data for cheap stuff, is it worth it? How invasive you can allow an app to be to benefit from their service? In our opinion, data is your digital value and it is more valuable than a 5$ t-shirt.
