Duolingo & Its Cheeky Notification Marketing

At this point, most of you would have come across the Duolingo memes that are usually in the form of edited notification screenshots. Yes, they are edited, Duolingo is not breaking into your house because you forgot to take your 5-minute Italian lesson 🤌

It all comes down to this — Guilt Marketing

One of the keys to Duolingo’s success is its lovable mascot, Duo the owl.

Duo keeps users motivated by celebrating their successes and reminding them of their language learning goals. But what happens when users don’t engage with the app regularly? That’s where guilt marketing comes in.

Guilt marketing is a powerful marketing strategy that creates a sense of obligation and responsibility in the minds of consumers. In the case of Duolingo, the app sends daily reminders and notifications to users who haven’t engaged with the app, including messages like “You’ve let Duo down”, “You made Duo sad.”, “These Reminders don’t seem to be working. We’ll stop sending them from now”.

These messages create a sense of cognitive dissonance, a discomfort that arises when a person’s actions don’t align with their beliefs or values. This discomfort can motivate users to take action and reduce the dissonance by engaging with the app more regularly.

Why Guilt Marketing can be an effective strategy?

Humans crave consistency and harmony in their thoughts and actions, as per cognitive consistency theory. When there’s a mismatch between their beliefs and actions, it causes discomfort or guilt. It’s like a mental conflict that arises when someone’s actions don’t align with their values or beliefs.

Guilt Marketing leverages this psychological tendency by creating a sense of responsibility or obligation in users to engage with the app and meet their language learning goals.

By framing their marketing messages in a way that emphasizes the user’s responsibility to Duo, Duolingo is able to tap into this sense of guilt and motivate users to take action.

Is this a successful model?

Depends on the approach companies decide to take. Using the passive aggressive tactic thatDuolingo does may not always hit the spot. As it is evident, people tend to make memes out of it and treat it as an annoyance rather than a positive prompt.

However, a change in tone has clearly worked for the Online meal delivery industry. Look at the notification's apps like Zomato and Swiggy does. It uses various strategies like puns, pop culture references and an overall feel-good approach whenever the user gets a notification.

Perhaps, if Duolingo shifts towards this approach, things might change for the better.

Until next time, Arrivederci!