It takes bravery to declare that business success is when your audience deletes your app. Yet Hinge’s gusty marketing declares it is  ‘The dating app designed to be deleted’.

Finding love in the age of algorithms isn’t easy. How do you solve a problem like encouraging Gen Z to go on dates in a world where the pandemic left many feeling anxious and socially stifled in their formative years? For Hinge, the answer lies in redefining the expectations of love and encouraging authentic and meaningful in-person interactions.

The brand’s latest campaign ‘No Ordinary Love’ is an anthology of love stories that challenge the notion of the perfect fairytale beginnings and instead celebrate the imperfections of love.

Championing real relationships by telling the stories of six couples who met on Hinge, the dating app has commissioned six contemporary literary futures to interpret the stories into modern romances and collated them in an 80-page zine made in collaboration with Dazed Studio.

IRL Love

The campaign takes inspiration from ‘BookTok’, a facet of TikTok that has been gaining popularity amongst Gen Z. Using romance literature as its inspiration, the campaign thrusts the romance lit genre into the modern era of dating. “We wanted to lean into romance literature and reimagine it in a way that is more useful for Gen Z by telling honest, truthful stories about how couples meet,” explains Jackie Jantos, Chief Marketing Officer at Hinge.

“Everything we do at Hinge is about getting people off the app and into great dates,” says Jantos. She continues: “From a marketing perspective, this means using all the assets and resources to drive people toward those dates giving tips and advice.”

Hinge aims to break down stereotypes of dating perfection and reassure young daters that not every love story begins like a fairytale. “Telling real stories about how people met on Hinge is part of our strategy,” explains Jantos, who explains: “Telling these stories in more honest and truthful ways was the starting point for this campaign.”

Designed to be deleted

Hinge’s marketing strategy and overarching ‘Designed to be deleted’ brand platform has raised eyebrows in the marketing community, with critics suspicious of the authenticity of the self-destructive motivation. Surely long term monogamy wont drive dating apps bottom line?

Yet, Jantos stresses that there is no greater marketing tool than Hinge’s success stories. Hearing the love stories of those that have deleted the app after finding their partner on Hinge encourages a whole new stream of users and validates the businesses’ commitment to servicing its users.

Jantos shares that ‘designed to be deleted’ is not only a marketing tool but an overarching strategy that drives product innovation. Features such as ‘your turn limits’ reduce the number of active conversations a user can have open. This encourages daters to focus on higher quality conversations rather than quantity. This focus on quality, closing conversations and driving the process towards the end goal of closing the app and finding a relationship ultimately builds user trust and the overall reputation of the Hinge brand.

Acting in service of modern daters

The modern dating scene is a far cry from meeting a friend of a friend in a pub, the pandemic has created barriers for young people and ultimately knocked confidence whilst also changing societal norms. Gen Z is Hinge’s core focus so understanding their needs, expectations and questions about dating helps the app to service its audience.

“90% of Gen Z are looking for love, what that looks like is very different. We want to honour the desire to help them to find what that looks like and give them the encouragement to get out and be with each other,” says Jantos.

“One of the things we think about a lot at Hinge is how this audience is spending a lot less time in person than cohorts before them. In the US and UK the research shows that a lot of their time is being displaced by technology and the impact of the lockdown has really impacted their desire and confidence of meeting in person,” continues Jantos. To help service this need, Hinge aims to encourage in-person interactions and build confidence to embrace imperfection and build social skills.

It is for this reason that ‘No Ordinary Love’ is made up of both physical and digital assets and embraces the power of long-form content. “Long format content is something Gen Z are engaging with as BookTok proves. We want to create an experience that is slow by design because there is a level of intentionality,” explains Jantos.

As well as chopping up the content online, Hinge has produced 10,000 zines that will be distributed across major cities.

“There's something really natural about a brand that desires to get people out on dates playing with artefacts that exist in the physical world,” explains Jantos, “It is a grounding reminder of the value of sitting down with another person’ and looking at something together that's not in technology.”

Telling authentic stories

The stories within the zines are not only the stories of real Hinge success stories, but they are told by modern literary voices in their own unique style. For example, ‘You again’ by John Paul Brammer tells the story of a couple who matched but didn't meet until they matched on hinge again. By working with creators and giving them the freedom to tell stories in their own unique ways Hinge is able to interact with culture and embrace diverse voices.

Jantos shares that Hinge’s owned Instagram channel is rarely used, instead, the brand chooses to champion creators and back their voices. “We have a history of working with creators in imaginative ways,” says Jantos. “One of the principals in our marketing team is with not for. Everything we build is built with not for the audiences we are in service of.”

In this way, Hinge can understand the culture of modern dating and act as a facilitator of that culture. Jantos points to the LGBTQIA+ community as a driving force of culture within dating.  By striving to pull in voices early in the marketing process, the brand has been able to build a diverse network of people both internally and externally to be able to create for their audience.

The creators bring their own lens but also a cultural edge. Hinge looks to its audiences to find creators that best serve its communities.

“We are in a state of constant learning and growth alongside creative individuals. When your goal is to help young people, help them get out on dates in a world where they are experiencing levels of loneliness and isolation we have never seen before, there’s really a shared agenda there with creators as well. It's a natural way to build relationships and build creativity.” adds Jantos.

Entertain, educate or inspire

“Any brand that is in service of Gen Z has an accountability to do right by this audience,” says Jantos. For Hinge, this comes in many forms. This includes a commitment to education by helping audiences ask the questions they might be too scared to ask in ‘Not-so-Frequently Asked Questions’. As well as serving audiences through entertainment and putting a smile on their faces by sending the lovable Hingey into the afterlife where Patti Harrison awaits. While No Ordinary Love dispels the notions of perfection by showcasing that love can be messy and giving young daters the confidence to give it a try.

By building a platform that strives to eliminate loneliness and isolation, Hinge is driving a date every two seconds. It may not be able to guarantee long-term love, but it's certainly empowering modern daters with the promise that one day they too can delete their app forever and find love. Or at the very least pause the scrolling to find the time for an IRL date.