Don’t forget to swipe: my beef with Bumble’s latest campaign
In the real world, I am one person with a single identity. Online, I can create a multitude of profiles based on whether I want to make friends, hook up, or find meaningful relationships. Neither tell the full picture of who I am or the full range of possibilities I am open to.
Swiping is one of the best UX behaviors ever invented. It allows us to quickly and gracefully feed snap judgements to a marketplace that can introduce us to potential mates and now even friends and business contacts. There have been many attempts at building double opt-in Tinder-like services for professional networking but I want to call out a recent marketing campaign from Bumble that has been bothersome.
In the hyper competitive dating landscape, many services have been trying to position their marketing as different from one another:
- Tinder is glamorizing and sexualizing single life, promoting hookups
- Hinge is for finding relationships
- Bumble is for generating the highest quality business connections, new friendships, and dates
This month, Bumble profiled 112 of the most inspiring New Yorkers on its platform (a few of whom I am friends with) in a multimillion dollar ad campaign throughout the city. These real life profiles are classified as singles, people open to new friendships, or people open to networking.
While Bumble’s vertical play in the softer friend/networking space is over two years old, this marketing push is trying to solidify Bumble as a less threatening service against its bro-rival Tinder. Here are these amazing people using our product, come sign up to meet them! It’s clever but it’s somewhat deaf to the problems my generation is facing with technology and socializing today. I understand the use case of moving to a new city and not knowing anyone, but this creates a two-dimensional picture of who I am in a shallow context with a lazy interaction that’s stolen from a completely different vertical (dating). I am fearful of a generation that doesn’t merely use technology as a means to augment their network, but heavily relies on it as an emotional crutch.
I am mindful of the impact that the surge in online dating has played out in the physical world. For example, the observation that a number of bars have effectively transitioned from normal watering holes towards first encounter safe spaces. Singles don’t meet as each other out as frequently because everyone who’s single has already showed up to the bar with a date. For every efficiency gained online through social networking is an equal offline counterbalance. I feel from my own usage that Instagram and online dating apps make us more prone to looking someone up online vs. taking a first step to approach them IRL.
Bumble wants to create awkward social marketplaces that used to be relegated to more organic environments like house parties, conferences, and meetups and put them in a safe vacuum. My generation wants efficiency without fear of rejection and they deliver that conveniently to our pockets. The result is two forked versions of a dating app that allows us to make snap judgements about who we want to become our new besties or LinkedIn contacts while sitting on the toilet. Online dating services and their adjacent business/friend product lines ultimately promote high school-like norms where the tall, beautiful people are valued the most.
There’s no stopping the ubiquity of swipe dating apps at this point, but there is some sanctity left in our day-to-day forming of new platonic connections. I don’t want to live in a world where people become less friendly IRL because it’s easier and safer to meet online. This is a plea to keep this area of social interaction sacred and organic, because if 10 years of mobile dating can tell us anything, it’s that technology doesn’t just augment our behavior, it has the potential to replace it entirely.
* Thanks Greg Kubin and Joshua Keay for their insightful feedback .
