Marketing in the News

1/19/20

Hi friends! Welcome back to another exciting week of blogging!

For this week's assignment we were to find an interesting article related to marketing and apply what we've learned thus far. After pondering through the internet for a while I finally found a neat article, For Bumble, the Future Isn't Female, It's Female Marketing that was published 1/17/20. I found this interesting because I've used Bumble off and on for the last few years.

Bumble is a fairly feminist dating app that is set up for women to make the first move, which I dig. With this set up there's less clutter in your inbox and possible unwanted images and/or comments. In direct relation, the founder, Wolfe Herd, was able to make contact with the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, through her husband. She ended up getting a bill passed that made it illegal for men to send "intimate parts," and doing so "without consent could be fined $500." This bill was passed back in August of 2019. After passing her first bill, she's on to passing more in the near future.

Wolfe Herd has been a successful marketer from the beginning. In the article they speak of when she was "23, she became Tinder's first vice president for marketing." Herd's technique for getting new users was genius. She went straight to " college campuses and persuaded women in sororities to sign up-then showed fraternities how many Tri Delts or Pi Phis they could meet if they did the same." And thus the battle of the matches ensued!

However given the dramatic increase of users she snagged, she only stayed with Tinder for roughly two years. There's not a ton of information on what actually happened due to a nondisclosure after she sued for sexual harassment. This is kind of where her role as a feminist began. "I was getting rape tweets, each tweets, go-kill-yourself tweets," it was really painful." Bumble was born out of that pain." It's sad how common sexual harassment is and how men think it's okay. I hate that she had to suffer for her to create such a great dating app geared towards safety and respect.

I believe Bumble's value proposition is safety, feminism, yellow, bees, The Hive, "Make the First Move."

The marketing relevance of this article is that you can make anything happen create a multi-million dollar company by thinking outside of the box, i.e. college students, parties.

A current challenge that the company is trying to overcome is upping the safety factor. The app is already one of the safer dating app, however it's not the safest one out there, eHarmony is one of the top safest.

What made their marketing approach unique is adding a block and report button to ensure more safety. This button has different options as for why you're blocking or reporting, such as: made me uncomfortable, abusive or threatening, inappropriate content, spam or scam, and stolen photo. According to a statistic in the article, after some bugs were fixed, the "reports of rude or inappropriate behavior had gone down 30%."

I probably would've done the same thing they did as I believe that safety is within their value proposition. If you have the ability to ensure more safety for your users, you're going to have a solid marketing advantage.

I believe the marketing solution was a fairly solid choice.

From this article I learned that you can move mountains and do anything you put your mind to if you want to bad enough.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-01-17/for-bumble-the-future-isn-t-female-it-s-female-marketing?utm_source=url_link