‘Send them a bottle of champagne’: Secrets of comms success from Tinder
Tinder communications boss Kirsty Dunn has revealed the challenges facing the dating mega-brand in the Australian market, including the “tall poppy syndrome” and the fact that Gen Z daters are living at home with their parents.
Speaking in the opening session of the Mumbrella Commscon today, Dunn – whose remit extends from Australia and Thailand – emphasised the importance of personal passion in communications success, along with consistency over time and partnerships.
Mumbrella’s Tim Burrowes with Kirsty Dunn at CommsCon
“In particular in Australia, tall poppy syndrome is alive and well. And I’m sure for many of you who look after big brands, you also feel this as well. It certainly keeps us in check as the biggest dating brand in the world … but we also have other challenges that we face.”
Dunn said Australian dating culture is idiosyncratic, partly because young people tend to study in the same place they grew up.
“Gen Z… tend to live at home a little bit longer, maybe past the age of 30, for financial reasons and also because they tend to go to school in the same city that they grew up in.”
The audience at Dunn’s Commscon session
“The pandemic really, really did impact them. It was their formative years of when they were meant to get out there and meet people and instead everything was completely virtual.”
Dunn recommended a communications strategy that followed a proactive/reactive hybrid, emphasising the need to get involved if your brand was left out – even in a problematic story.
Campaigns that had worked well for Tinder in the Australian market included a partnership with Queensland Police to address rising sexual assaults linked to online dating.
“So rather than shy away from it, we embraced it,” Dunn said. “We worked with Queensland Police and we worked with NGOs to create four different creatives that ran in-app… to educate people on what to look out for and how to report, critically, how to report if something happens.”
Another successful initiative was “School of Swipe”, an aggregation of Tinder’s educational material.
Dunn said as well as personal passion, old school connection with press contacts and stakeholders went a long way.
“What is also really important, and something that we started at Tinder that I think has really helped move the needle, is the 101 media relations that we all learned on day one of agency life – actually getting out there and having coffees, but also going that step further: following them on socials, finding out what makes them tick, what their likes and dislikes are, what their passions and hobbies are. Send them a bottle of champagne if they get engaged or get married – it goes such a long way.”
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