Have you downloaded Temu? Click on my referral link! Accept my invitation!
This has been the motif of the day for a while now. People continuously send referral links to people to help them click. The company in mid-February marked 100 days in Nigeria. Recently, a lot of Nigerian university students have caught the plague by begging people to click on their referral links to get the freebies available on the app for them.
What is Temu?
Temu is a Boston-based online marketplace launched in September 2022 by PDD Holdings, the parent company of the successful Chinese e-commerce platform Pinduoduo. According to Nairalands in December 2024, the company spent $1.3 billion on ads to enter the Nigerian market.
Some students have gotten enough products from Temu to start up their content creation game. Some have gotten enough products to set up a house.
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Temu’s marketing and sales promotion strategies
As a student of Marketing, I thought the sales promotion technique was too good to be true until I started seeing people get free items from the app. They might not have paid with money but they paid with your connections. When you download the app, you get a lucky spin, which gives you a coupon to get things you want for free! Then, you can proceed to order! Hol’ up! You cannot get it until you refer a stipulated amount of people.
The payment leverages on spontaneous networking that you must have within a designated time which creates a sense of urgency for the customer. The customer carries this pressure and invests it in getting folks to register on the app.
Someone once said the Temu app is characterized by heavy ad popups, more with an intrusive user interface. With a make-believe algorithm, it sells you a lucky narrative that ushers you to a point of you-can-now-decide-your-fate-by-simply-referring-people.
Another compensation method is that when you download the app, you get a lucky spin which gives you free coupons for a price slot. Therein, you can order products worth your coupon price. But where it gets tricky is when you have to buy other products worth a price to get your ‘gifts’.
A little secret! Some folks have found a way around this. If they do not have money to purchase the threshold set for them to receive their gifts, they gather people who want to get things from Temu. Once they can string people who want to get stuff from Temu and they reach the threshold, they order to get their free products delivered without necessarily paying a dime.
How Temu is taking over the e-commerce trading market?
Temu primarily focuses on direct connections between manufacturers or brand owners and consumers, bypassing resellers who add markups. By connecting consumers directly with manufacturers and brands, Temu eliminates the need for intermediaries. This keeps costs for sellers low which enables lower prices for shoppers.
Temu directly ships its products from manufacturers making them significantly cheap and a luring factor for people to buy. Another plus to this is that it offers users free shipping and delivery to their desired location. Though the shipping time might not be fast because of its ridiculous pricing will buy you in.
Kudos to Temu’s marketing team
I laud the marketing strategy of the company as the company was able to grab the most downloaded app in Nigeria just within a few months of introduction. The brand thrives on having a user-friendly app interface, a delusion of fueled need for a product by creating a sense of urgency, and also proffered help from the company through the app to get people to buy. They present an obvious discount slash which has a very limited offer.
Mind you, while ordering from Temu, make sure you read the product description so that you won’t play the What I ordered vs What I got game
When you appeal to people’s emotions through means of compliance gaining, you get them to do that which they will normally not do. People no longer need physical stores to go on a shopping spree, Temu serves them. Temu has tapped into the psychological aspect of appealing to people to get them to buy. They somehow cloud their mind through the luxurious display and flashing of products. They tell you to shop like a billionaire and give you a few thousand to start with.
Whatever the marketing department of Temu was aimed to achieve, no doubt, they are achieving it as Temu is on the lips of almost all internet literates.
