AGORIZE

TINDER MARKETING CONTEST

Summary

This case study describes a marketing campaign which was submitted to online platform Agorize as part of a contest. The challenge from Agorize was to transform how people use Tinder and shake off its image as a hook-up app. This campaign aimed to challenge and address such a perception via a brand-new feature ‘Tinder Shuffle’. As a result, this campaign was ranked 5th out of over 130 submissions.

Background

Whilst Tinder is marketed as a dating app, it is rarely used as such. Besides hook-ups, very few users get around to meeting someone at all. To decide on a strategy, we first needed to better understand how people are using Tinder. From online research, we obtained the following data:

Clearly there are two distinct behaviors corresponding to each gender.

Male users swipe right (like) on a higher percentage of profiles than female users - men swipe right on 1 in every 10 profiles. However, men only message 7% of their matches. That leaves 93% of male’s matches with no contact. Male users on tinder go for a tactic of brute force: messaging as many profiles as possible, perhaps without even considering the details (biography, additional pictures) of each profile. If a swipe results in a match, only then do male users consider the details and decide if they want to engage with this match. There even exists auto swiping apps which can take away the arduous task of swiping right on consecutive profiles. See here and here.

The male user thinks that more swipes = more matches = better chance of meeting someone.

In contrast, female users are more selective. Female users swipe right on 0.6% of profiles - one right swipe for every 166 left swipes. The female approach is more tactical – considering how to improve the quality of their matches. There are even news articles detailing ‘strategies’ that users can adopt to improve their matches, See here and here.

Consequently, females are 3x more likely to message a match than a male user. The female mind set is less swipes = better matches = better chance of meeting someone. From this, we imagined the following cycle of behaviour:

Female users are becoming more selective and hence harder to match with
Realising this, male users become less selective
Female users then recieve more matches as a result of this behaviour from male users
Female users realise they can be more selective

Step 4 then feeds into step 1. We can then see how this cycle leads to two extremities of behaviour from both genders that will worsen over time. Having constructed this model of users’ behaviour on the app, we realised something crucial. Both genders had turned an emotive process (dating) into a tactical and systematic process – a game. This is hardly surprising considering that Tinder is ultimately a phone app.

Approach

Our marketing strategy needed to address the tactical ways the app is being used. Tinder had already attempted to tackle the ‘brute force’ method that we saw in male users. Tinder’s approach was to introduce a limit to how many swipes any user could perform in one day. Limiting swipes saw matches per swipe increase by 25% and messages per match increase by 25%. Although successful, this new feature didn’t address the underlying issue – people were still approaching the app as a game. Users could pay to surpass the block. If users didn’t do this, all the block would do is make users more methodical and tactical. Users were still ultimately seeing each profile as a collection of statistics and information rather than a person.

Our approach needed to eliminate the ‘game’ usage and force users to engage emotionally with the app. We therefore aimed to mirror the emotions of real-life dating within the app. Specifically, we wanted to mirror the feeling of ‘new beginnings’: the excitement, the mystery, the butterflies the accompanies meeting someone new in real life. Further research uncovered the following data:

Question: Do you believe in soulmates?

Execution

To decide on the new feature that would serve as the execution of this insight, we needed to think about what made real-life dating so special. Ultimately, we felt that it was the mystery of meeting someone new that made a moment ‘magical’. Our feature needed to contain an element of mystery.

The feature we conceived was ‘Tinder Shuffle’. Tinder Shuffle evokes the mystery of real-life dating by automatically matching up two users. For these matches to be considered seriously by the users, Tinder Shuffle will use a machine learning algorithm to understand the preference (age, location, careers, looks) of each user. The constraints of the algorithm will be slightly more relaxed than the inherent preferences of the user. This will enable users to be paired with others who are suitable but may have been ignored in the deck for one reason or another. This ‘special’ match will be called on by clicking the Tinder Shuffle button. The moment that this ‘specially chosen’ user is matched is meant to mirror the feeling of 'new-beginnings'.

Currently on tinder there exists an undo button – allowing a user to undo an accidental ‘no’ swipe. The undo button is most likely used by those who are swiping too fast to register profiles that they are genuinely interested in – the exact behaviour that we are trying to eradicate. As such, the Tinder Shuffle button is intended to replace the undo button. Using the Tinder Shuffle button will be restricted in frequency to once a month. The aim of restricting has the following intentions:

Better reflects how often a person could realistically meet a potential love interest in real life
Gives longer for someone to pay attention to their current ‘special’ match before possibly moving on to a new one
Solves the choice overload that users get when swiping through a seemingly infinite deck of people

Most importantly, limiting the use of the Tinder Shuffle button implies that it takes a long time to find this ‘special’ match. This further deepens the perceived significance of a shuffle match and hence mirrors the significance of meeting a ‘soul mate’.

Result

This submission was ranked 5th out of over 130 entries on Agorize.