The failure to understand your audience 🐝

Why bumble’s celibacy ads failed

I don’t usually write about news. But sometimes news remind us of what’s important. There has been a lot of uproar about Bumble’s latest celibacy ads during the last week. They reminded me of what happens when a brand strays from its values and core purpose.

“We champion integrity, kindness, equality, confidence, and respect during all stages of any relationship.[…] On Bumble, women set the tone by making the first move or by setting an Opening Move for matches to reply to. Shifting old-fashioned power dynamics and encouraging equality from the start.”
Bumble

🐝 What was the campaign message?

If you haven’t seen the ad campaign, it features a woman who gets tired of fating and decided to join a group of nuns. In the night, a nun offers the woman a phone with bumble on it. The next day, we see the woman leaving the nuns and the text on screen reads: “We’ve changed, so you don’t have to”. For some people that seemed fine. It obviously got approved by someone at Bumble, right? 

🍯 Why did it fail?

The world is not built for women or by women. And neither is the dating scene. Bumble was the one app centred around the concept of ‘empowering women’ to date in their terms, because dating is a scary place for heterosexual women. Bumble’s message comes across more as shaming women and being dismissive rather than cheekiness (which is what we assume was intended). The campaign would have probably caused a reaction no matter which brand came up with it, but it really hit the nerve coming from Bumble.

When your entire brand is proclaiming to be built for women in mind, you can’t release a campaign that shames women for not having sex with the men on your app. In a world fighting for autonomy and respect over our bodies, it’s appalling to see a dating platform undermining women’s choices.

In simple terms, the campaign failed for two reasons: it strayed from the brand’s core values and more importantly it came out at the wrong time (even though I doubt there was ever a right time for this campaign), not acknowledging the fight women are facing for control over their bodies and choices. Bumble failed to understand and acknowledge the struggles and concerns of its target audience. With the campaign, the brand showed a lack of respect and tapped into the stereotypes its female audience is tired of hearing or being related to.

🌼 What can we learn from this?

Sometimes brands get things wrong. That always happens when they fail to understand their audience. It’s not about missing the mark, this is going deeper, because it alienates a huge part of its users. A public apology is a good start, but it will take a while for the brand to bounce back, especially in today’s tired dating-app environment.

If anything, this outcome is showing us that the world is changing. Twenty years ago this campaign might have come out without causing a reaction. But in the world we live in now, change and social shifts are in place, with GenZ leading a charge against a lot of the tired old stereotypes (usually set by middle class white men I might add) that we’ve had to face through the years.

I invite you to think about ads you have seen over the years that would have caused a riot today. How many of those are now considered outrageous?