Tinder, Marketing Campaign & Product Strategy
Tinder makes being single more fun and rewarding by connecting people who may not have otherwise met in real life by celebrating that being single is a journey. Today, the public health focus has shifted from being about connecting but rather being associated with “digital bathhouses.” Approximately 20 million new STD infections each year—almost half of them among young people ages 15 to 24. STD rates are rising because of the use of dating apps and sites to arrange casual and often anonymous sexual encounters. This project seeks to create a fictional product campaign tied to a product feature to show the potential of adding basic sexual health information within the Tinder ecosystem.
The Opportunity
My team was tasked with creating a campaign for our choice for any product or service. With this campaign, we had displayed an overall vision for the purpose of the campaign, define stakeholders & personas, set objectives and success metrics, and exploring tactics to achieve this goal. We decided to focus on Tinder, a geosocial networking and online dating application that allows users to anonymously swipe to like or dislike other profiles based on their photos, a small bio, and common interests. Once two users have “matched,” they can exchange messages. Tinder was identified as our target company due to their lack of addressing sexual health in their entire dating ecosystem. Apps like Bumble and Grindr have a spectrum of information varying from the best sexual practices of their target demographic, so it made sense to create a campaign for Tinder to address this lack of information.
Tinder Overview
Background:
- There are ~50M Tinder users with ~5.9M Tinder Gold Subscribers ($1.2B in annual revenue)
- 30M Matches per day with a peak period of 6 PM-10 PM (Best time to get a tinder match is 9 PM
- Women swipe right on men less than men swipe right on women (14% compared to 46%
- 79% of Tinder users are Millennials
- ~60% are outside of the US
- No sex education materials anywhere (the brand tends to dismiss that they are a hookup app)
- No way in the ecosystem for users to see if individuals have been tested recently
The Process
My team wanted to explore the stigma around sex and asked ourselves, "How might we empower sexually active individuals to ask their partner for their sexual health status." With this statement in mind, we identified the following problems:
- There is still a stigma about talking with your partner about sex and their status.
- People either ignore or are uncomfortable with talking about their situation with people they are having or plan to have sex with
- Most platforms are antiquated (either paper or word of mouth /trust) and don't show validity.
- Testing requires you to go to your doctor.
- There are disparate dating apps.
Goals
In addition, to increasing MAU's of tinder Gold subscriptions, we felt it was essential to satisfy the following for our target demographic:
- Motivate sexually active individuals to care about their sexual health status to remove the stigma of asking their partner
- Establish Tinder as a brand that cares about reducing STD transmission rates
- Improve the feature set to let users search by STD Status.
Personas
We identified heterosexual college students between the ages of 18-23 as our target audience within the Tinder Ecosystem as we felt these individuals were more susceptible to STD's and had less blanket education than that of their LGBTQ counterparts. Because of this, we decided that partnering with a company like Everly Well (Revenue Marketing Partner) along with Universities could create the best synergistic relationship.
- Chaz is a bit self-centered while being vocal and outlandish without concern to those around them. He is most caring about partying or having a good time despite who it affects or bothers and is highly motivated by sexual desire, drinking, and being vocal about what he is doing.
- Sammie is the new aged version of Carrie Bradshaw, who understands her worth, but is open to exploring her sexuality. She is headstrong, confident, and understands that she holds power and authority over the men she dates. Getting into her bed is not an easy feat, but well worth it.
Strategy
Our Strategy was to create a year long campaign tied to the academic school year for the LA metro area which then could be rolled out either nationally or globally which would include the following:
- STI testing with the campaign partner Everlywell, an at home STD/STI kit with Telehealth perscroption and consultations for positive tests.
- Experiential marketing using participatory, hands-on, and tangible branding material, the business can show its customers not just what the company offers like dating hosted chat rooms, dating events, and fireside chats with top social influencers around the stigma of sexual health
- A series of text message recorded videos of horror stories that would be used as display ads, social content, and commercials
- Updated resources including in-app and web, that make it easy to get answers or learn about sexual health
- Free month of Tinder gold for regular STI testing
We hypothesize the following:
- ~1M College Students in the LA Metro Area
- ~30% we expect to attract with this campaign
- ~16% will activate / test (those who utilize everlywell for tinder gold conversion)
- ~18% retention of users who continue use their tinder gold
- ~12% of users will generate revenue and convert to paid users
- ~6% will refer other students to the app services via the campaign