Bumble launched their campaign ‘Kindness is sexy’ to promote their recently launched ‘Compliments’ feature. Through this 360-degree integrated campaign across ATL, Digital, Influencer, Social and earned channels, Bumble garnered over 4 million clicks and resulted in over 9% lift in brand awareness scores in India. Here's a case study on how they did it.
Category Introduction
The dating category in India has seen phenomenal growth over the last 5 years and today, India is one of the 5th largest markets for dating apps globally. At least 5.8% of the youth have used at least one dating platform as there has been adoption from not just metro cities but also tier 1 and tier 2 cities in India.
Brand Introduction
Bumble was founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2014. Bumble connects people across dating (Bumble Date), friendship (Bumble For Friends) and professional networking (Bumble Bizz). Bumble is built on the importance of equitable relationships and their importance to a healthy, happy life.
Summary
Adapting from its global brand positioning, Bumble in India launched its integrated brand campaign ‘Kindness is sexy’ to champion kindness in relationships. In today’s polarised world, the brand tries to demonstrate the power of kind connections and showcase how single Indians have valued acts of kindness such as respect, equal gestures, and vulnerability as the most important markers for desirability and compatibility in relationships. This campaign was anchored by a digital film featuring Bollywood actor, Aditya Roy Kapur and other digital films showcasing real-life Bumble success stories. Bumble leveraged an omnichannel mix to launch this campaign across mainline media channels like OOH and print innovation, followed by digital media, influencer marketing, social, in-app, and press channels.
Through this campaign, Bumble also drove awareness for one of their latest features, ‘Compliments’ using which daters can share positive comments or compliments on their prospective matches’ profile.
Objective
The objective of this campaign was to establish awareness of Bumble’s kindness movement and drive the adoption of the Compliments feature as a new way to forge meaningful connections.
Brief
Per Bumble’s nationwide study, 81% of single Indians consider kindness as the most desirable quality in their partner. Leaning into this insight, Bumble’s brief was to develop a clutter-breaking narrative that flipped the script and spotlighted ‘kindness’ as the key message across channels.
Creative Idea
Bumble centred this campaign around the creative platform of ‘Kindness is sexy’ juxtaposing stereotypical codes of sexiness against actions and attitudes that are seen as desirable in the context of modern romance such as equal effort, empathetic gestures, mutual respect, and vulnerability to champion the power of kind connections. This creative platform was brought to life across two key phases: awareness and advocacy building through diverse video, audio and static creatives.
Challenges
Balancing tonality and nuances in messaging was the biggest challenge of this campaign — from not portraying Bumble in an extremely flippant or sleazy tone of voice with the use of the word ‘sexy’ to showcasing tangible acts of kindness in everyday relationships in the most relatable form.
Execution
This campaign was brought to life in two key phases:
Phase 1: Awareness
The first phase of the campaign was building awareness with the brand's digital film featuring Bollywood actor Aditya Roy Kapur.
Along with a hyperlocal touch by placing OOH in key cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Kolkata.
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This was supplemented with a print innovation in the Times of India.
Over 14 influencer videos and an in-app kindness challenge drove further adoption of the Compliments feature.
Brand partners like Duolingo organically leveraged their OOH creative and created a fun collab reel on Instagram.
Phase 2 - Success Stories
Consideration and advocacy building by showcasing success stories of real Bumble couples and how acts of kindness played an instrumental role in their relationships. These stories were amplified across digital and social channels.
Results
- The digital films received over 1 billion impressions, 700K+ views, 4M+ clicks and counting. The film with Aditya Roy Kapur received an engagement rate of 18.6% within the first four hours of launch on Instagram.
- Brand awareness and favorability increased by 9% during the campaign duration.
- As part of our multi-pronged press strategy, the brand landed national coverage in publications across India, resulting in 97 stories and 1.4B+ press impressions.
Paarmi Modi, Marketing Director, India and SEA at Bumble shares, “Bumble’s campaign comes at a time when singles in India are more focused on kindness as a key element of their dating decisions. Kindness is our core value, with our latest campaign 'Kindness is sexy’, our endeavour has been to redefine the idea of attraction and spotlight desirable traits in a relationship. We are thrilled to feature Aditya Roy Kapur alongside heartwarming stories of real life Bumble couples to create awareness around the power of kind connections amongst single daters in India.”
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