Dating app Tinder doesn’t disclose full statistics but even some of the available estimates are mind-boggling: more than 50 million Tinder users every month; more than 1bn profile swipes, more than 12m matches made every day.
If you think about 1bn swipes and 12m matches, that’s a lot of rejections.
We all like to talk about brands and people in the language of human relationships. This is despite there being only a small but illuminating body of evidence to support these human relationship analogies.
But is this right? Shouldn’t we at least ask whether we are out of touch with the reality of these relationships? If people’s power over brands has increased, haven’t these brand relationships changed too? Or were they ever truly human?
Swipe right
“Generation Tinder” is a mindset we all need to think about. It’s not just a narrow age group or consumer segment; it’s not just people in their twenties. The Tinder generation prizes ease, accessibility and value over loyalty.
But it’s more than that. The simple choice to swipe left or swipe right is a mindset that people love. Brands must respond to this.
To understand Generation Tinder, brands must understand that people within this bracket don’t always tell the truth. Sometimes they don’t even know the truth of why they do what they do. Research has to change to reflect this. Focus groups can be like bad relationship counselling; we understand fast (put simply, automated) and slow (analytical) thinking, but we rely on research approaches that depend on a slow thinking response.
Slow thinking responses are filtered, self-justified and context-dependent. They can’t be trusted. It’s time to use tools and techniques involving social communities, task-based research and neuroscience. This will help us to understand the effects of technology on people, as our recent presentation on neuroplasticity at South by South West showed.
According to our research, many of the brands that people believe they have the strongest connection with are to be expected. But there’s more to these relationships. For example, Apple was described as a “best friend” by more than 35% of respondents; and 55% said that they “couldn’t live without” it.
Many industry commentators would describe the obsessive relationship many people have with Apple as “brand love” but more than 35% of people actually describe it as that of a best friend.
EasyJet was described as a “friend with benefits” by more than 70% of respondents. Contrast this with what people said about their “brand love” for British Airways. While many professed love for the airline, they were off having a friends-with-benefits relationship with EasyJet.
Our research also studied in-store behaviours in the energy drink market. We used neuroscience to understand the behavioural triggers. We saw how a low loyalty brand could win over supposed loyal buyers of a competitor with cult following. We were able to get people to switch due to pack design changes and in-store messaging, without resorting to price discounting.
So what did we conclude? Brand love doesn’t always matter as much as we think. Brands often see loyalty as love when it’s something else. To survive and thrive in this world of changing relationships, brands need to understand where they really sit within these relationship typologies.
Excitement, stress, anxiety and joy
There’s one final point to consider about Tinder: the emotional response of swiping right and matching with someone. People experience excitement, stress, anxiety and joy. That’s four emotions in seconds. This is intoxicating stuff.
It’s no longer just about ease through technology; it’s about how brands are helping us solve problems by simplifying them, but also wrapping them up in the types of emotional responses usually associated with love and loyalty (as well as potentially creating addictive chemical responses in our brains).
Some brands seem to be training people for a new type of loyalty, based on offering super-simplistic life problem-solvers, with deep emotions and chemical responses built in. In turn, this raises the possibility that ideas of “brand love” are dead. Perhaps it’s time to start over.
Neil Davidson is managing partner at Hey Human
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