2 Billion Swipes Per Day Across 190 Countries, with Stephanie Danzi, SVP and Head of Global Marketing for Tinder

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of The Next CMO podcast, I speak to Stephanie Danzi, the SVP and Global Head of Marketing for Tinder, the world’s most popular app for meeting new people that has been downloaded more than 530 million times. The app is available in 190 countries and 45+ languages. More than half of all members are 18-25 years old. In 2022, Tinder was named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

EPISODE NOTES

 

Peter: The next CMO podcast explores topics that are on the minds of forward thinking marketing executives from leadership and strategy to emerging technologies, and we bring these topics to life by interviewing leading experts in their fields. The next CMO is sponsored by Planful for marketing. A leading marketing performance management solution that automates marketing, planning, financial management, and ROI optimization.

In hosted by me Peter Mahoney, an experienced C M O C E O board member and executive advisor.

In this episode of the next C M O podcast, I speak to Stephanie Danzi. Stephanie is the Senior Vice President and global head of marketing at Tinder, where she leads brand strategy, product marketing, and creative. She’s been named A C M O to watch by Business Insider in 2022, and she’s an amazing marketer with deep experience in C P G as well as deep experience within the dating app category.

We learn a ton from Stephanie about how they approach marketing a brand that is global, across 190 countries with 2 billion plus swipes a day on their platform, how data informs their decisions, how she thinks about the business, value of brand, and much, much more. I hope you’ll enjoy the show.

Hey Stephanie, thank you so much for being on the next C M O podcast. Really excited for the conversation, and maybe you can start by giving us a little bit of background on Stephanie and on Tinder. I.

Stephanie: Hi, Peter. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here and to be talking to you. So I’m a brand marketing executive. I head up global marketing at Tinder and I’ve been in the marketing space for 15 years working at brands. Both very big and very small. Like I said, I currently run global marketing for Tinder, but prior to that I launched several dating apps for Match Group, which is Tinder’s parent company.

And before that I was at PepsiCo for nearly a decade in a variety of brand marketing and brand innovation roles. So Tinder is the number one dating app globally. It is more than half of Gen Z users, and it’s really the place where they go to learn how to date. I’m very proud to say Tinder is the largest and most diverse dating app globally, and so we really see dating trends as it happens.

The scale of Tinder is quite staggering. For those of you who have not used a dating app, you. You may not realize how large it is. There’s actually a million and a half dates happening a week as a result of Tinder all around the world. We’re number one in 160 countries, and it’s just a category that I am super passionate about.

I actually met my husband on a group dating app, and I was a Tinder user 10 years ago when it launched. So I have a lot of experience both as a consumer and on the marketing side.

Peter: Well, that’s awesome and I probably have lots of questions about this particular domain, having personally been off the market for more than 35 years, so, so, when I was in this world it apps like this didn’t exist, so we had to do it, you know, with old school and selling, sending telegraphs and things like that back in the day.

Well, really excited to have this conversation, Stephanie and the scope of the company is really compelling, and I just saw just from your quick stats from your website you mentioned what, a million and a half dates a day, something like that, which is

Stephanie: A million and a half to a week, which is pretty amazing. And probably even if you haven’t used a dating app, I’m sure you know somebody who met their spouse or their partner on Tinder. Yep.

Peter: Now, absolutely. And and now I have kids who use dating apps, right? So my kids are, Old enough although one of them is pretty locked down, so we’ll see how that goes. The other thing that was stunning to me is the let’s see tens of millions of users, hundreds of millions of downloads, two billions swipes per day which is an interesting metric.

20 million matches per day. And, but the thing that really blew me away is 190 countries. I didn’t know there were 190 countries. I always thought it was like 178 or something like that, but clearly I’m wrong. So that, that is, it’s really interesting. And I’ve got a lot of questions about the data behind your marketing, but before we did get into that I wanted to just probe a little bit into your background, which is really interesting, and spent a lot of time in the CPG space where you kind of cut your marketing teeth.

Tell me what the CPG space, sort of, what part of that experience was most transferable to what you’re doing in Tinder today?

Stephanie: You know it, it’s funny. People really think CPG versus tech marketing as completely different worlds, and I found them to be, I. Highly transferable. A key difference between c p G and tech is how quickly you can get data. And I think as a result of that, you see, tech marketers do seem to spend a lot more time thinking of return whereas c, PG companies, you’re thinking, You are of course thinking about the business, but you’re thinking more about p and l overall and marketing as a lever of that versus specifically return on ad spend.

But what was super transferable for me is I’m a huge believer in marketing as a business driver, and that marketing is really there to help solve customer problems. And so I found whether that’s working in soda and food and beverages from PepsiCo or that’s in the business of love, you’re really trying to figure out.

What are pain points that people are facing today and how can my brand and my product help solve those and create amazing creative that can help, you know, bring people into your product and solve a lot of those problems, like at the end of the day, you’re still selling a brand. You’re selling a product that’s super core to the human experience, and you’re figuring out how to talk to people about that.

Peter: Well, that’s great. And it’s interesting you say that in tech and cpg there, there’s a lot of similarity and I find that to be. Really true just from the discussions I’ve had over the years here with lots of CMOs on on this podcast and just in my experience overall that there, there’s a lot that that CPG can learn from tech, that tech can learn from cpg, that B2C can learn from b2b, that B2B inverse.

So it’s there’s a lot in both in both areas and I suspect there’s a lot of convergence that’s going on as marketing in general becomes more technical and more data driven. But to follow up on the, on that one question, so that, that’s what sort of you were most prepared for, what was the thing that you were least prepared for when you got to Tinder?

The thing that you said, holy cow. Wow. I wasn’t expecting that, or, this is hard. I have no idea to do how to do this.

Stephanie: Yeah, so I joined Match Grew or and a half years ago, and I joined to launch a dating app, which was called Ship, so it hadn’t even launched yet. It was creating a brand from scratch, creating a go-to market from scratch. And launching it into the world. And when I interviewed at Match Group, the CEO at the time, Mandy Ginsburg, actually said to me, we don’t really know how to do brand marketing.

And we know that brand marketing is increasingly important in tech and in our industry. And so we need you to come here and help show us how brand marketing can work. And so, I knew coming in that was gonna be a challenge, but I think I. One of the toughest things as a tech mark, as a as marketer in tech is on some forums you get a ton of data and so it’s really easy to default to, Hey, performance is working.

I know because I can see the short term numbers. It’s much harder though. It is still possible to show how brand builds over time that does for the business. And so I found, you know, in the world of Pepsi, there are decades and decades of. Pepsi commercials to draw from and learnings to draw from, and people just inherently understand.

This has always been a part of the category. When you get into tech marketing, I spend, especially in an executive capacity, I spend a lot of my time justifying what I’m doing and showing how the return pays off, and doing a lot of AB testing and fast learning to figure out what levers are driving success for the long term versus just focusing on the short term.

Because I think if you. If you focus on performance only and return on ad spend only, you’re really chasing a small group. It’s just, it’s kind of a race to the bottom in terms of cheapest cost, and especially for a product like Tinder, which is a marketplace. You really need a balanced ecosystem and you need to be bringing in the right people.

I think that’s true everywhere though, right? You need people who are actually engaged, who are gonna talk about your product, who are gonna drive word of mouth, whether it’s an ecosystem product or not. And the only way to do that is to really have a strong brand that you’re communicating, and you need to do that in forums besides just the highest return on ad spend in the short term.

Peter: It presents a really interesting challenge when you are planning and thinking in the long term, and at the same time facing these really short term pressures, sometimes quarterly, sometimes monthly, sometimes daily, but based on the business that you’re dealing with. So how do you balance that and try to tell the story with data to.

As you said, a category that may not be used to thinking in terms of a multi-year plan where you have to think about the fact that, hey, I’m gonna accumulate value through this brand campaign over a series of maybe 6, 8, 12, 16 quarters, something like that. How do you frame that discussion? And and get the right kind of executive financial support you need to make the investments that are important for the strategic growth of the company.

Stephanie: When I came into Tinder, I found that we had struggled to articulate all of the possibilities of Tinder and all of the amazing relationships that come from it, all of the different kinds of people who are on Tinder. And as a result, media and consumers had sort of created this narrative that Tinder was.

Really for one thing, which was kind of one night. And when you look at the category, Tinder created the category. All these other brands started positioning themselves counter to Tinder. Because dating, because Tinder is such a behemoth, and let’s be honest, dating is really hard. It’s really painful, it’s really vulnerable.

It can be extremely fun, but it can also be really demoralizing. And so, As more and more people started dating on Tinder kind of became conflated with some of the negatives of dating, which are frankly dating problems, not Tinder problems. And so illustrating that to our c e o and our leadership team of how Tinder’s brand perception had fallen.

And why we needed to reverse that was really important. And so you can look at brand health, you can court that with business results. You can look at competitive spend. There are a number of things to help illustrate that case. I think the other really fundamental shift that I have pushed for with my teams and with our leadership team is there are some.

People who believe you’re either driving the business or you’re driving brand. And that kind of goes back to what I was talking about with, I think performance gets, performance drives the business, and then brand does. I’m not really sure it’s just something fluffy. I. I am a huge believer. The brand is what drives the business.

And if you tell me, oh, I ran this campaign and it drove consideration, but actually I didn’t see anything pull through in the numbers, something’s off on that to me. Right? That means that either you’re tracking isn’t right from a business or perception perspective or. You’re selling people something that your product isn’t paying off on.

And so theoretically they’re bought into your brand, but they’re not bought into your product. And so shifting the way that the team thought about brand building the business was really important and saying it’s not either or. While I’m a huge believer that you need to make choices in what any campaign is doing, you should not have a brand or a business goal.

It’s really both.

Peter: Absolutely. I think you’re really right on with that and in the conversation I often have with with CMOs and CEOs is that when you think about, Making an investment in brand, I always ask them to what end? So what are you trying to achieve? And it, that thing you’re trying to achieve should always be some, we call it a business outcome.

Let’s be real. It’s a financial outcome, so it’s something you should see on your p and l. And it could be expressed in the form of if you’re trying to create category awareness as an example, which you don’t need anymore, right? It may be about. Seeing growth in, in organic interest in your category and that’s driving overall growth.

And there should be a thesis for what that is and the value of what that growth is over time. And the value should be higher than the investment that you’re making in brand, theoretically. Or on the other side if you are trying to, you’re competing and you’re trying to make sure that at the consideration phase someone Is looking at your brand versus someone else’s.

Your win rate is higher, but the result is money. At the end of the day, you should see something on the p and l, and I think the more marketers understand that it’s, I mean, obviously we create goodwill, we create feeling, but there’s a purpose. And the purpose is often, not often. It should be always financial when you get there, which is I think something that gets lost with some people.

Stephanie: I totally agree. And that’s always top on my mind when we’re briefing in something new. It’s, yes, I wanna do something cool that shapes culture, but that’s not a vanity project. It’s because that’s how you cut through the noise and that’s how you can right move perception or drive awareness or we are trying to do, and that should ultimately show up in your p and l.

Peter: Yes. It should and more CMOs need to understand that and act that way because it’s not universal. I can tell you that. so, speaking of brand, one of the things that’s really complicated with. A brand like Tinder is the fact that you are, as we just found out a couple of minutes ago, marketing in 190 countries.

So the, how do you create that localization from a brand perspective where there has to be some central core brand promise. But the way that’s messaged down at the country level where customs are different from country to country, how do you make that connection and not lose the power of a single co coherent brand message?

Stephanie: Yeah it’s such a great question and it’s a challenge for anyone who was working on a global brand. So when I joined Tinder, I was the first person with any type of global scope in my title. I was the first part to be thinking about how do we take all of these different local dating customs and think about Tinder as one global brand and global product.

And the product is pretty much the same everywhere, so, so I think there’s a balance. Every market does have unique needs, but every market also has a surprising amount of commonalities. And that’s very true with dating. So we’ve seen with Tinder in particular, Relationships are super important everywhere.

Connection is incredibly important. Everywhere. People want to meet people and see what can come of that. And so, you know, what we really leaned into is what are those central. Truths, which is kind of that magic and serendipity that comes from when you meet somebody that you really hit it off with.

And that can happen for a night or that can happen forever or that can happen anywhere in between. But regard there’s kind of those butterflies and those excitements along the way when you’re getting to know people. And so Tinder just launched its first. Global brand campaign back in late February, and this is the first time we’ve had one consistent brand message across the world.

So it’s launched in five different continents. The campaign is called, it Starts with a Swipe, and it’s all about the different things that come from a swipe. I’m really proud of this work because. It sounds so simple, right? It starts from a swipe. It’s so true to the core product equity of a swipe and all of the different relationship milestones that can come, but it was a ton of work to get to something that was so simple.

We worked with our country managers. All across the world and got insights and ideas from them of, Hey, what do people look for when they’re dating and what are relationship milestones that Gen Z is excited about? And so what we ended up with was like climate change is really important to a lot of people, especially in Europe and they.

We hear from our members all the time that they’ll go on a date with somebody and that person will have a plastic water bottle and that gives them the ick and that’s disgusting. And so have a, we have one of our out-of-home creative is actually this like giant plastic bottle monster, and it’s two people holding hands kind of looking like superheroes.

And it says someone to fight climate change with. It starts with a swipe. And then there’s all these other milestones like leaving a toothbrush at somebody’s house that we never really celebrate, but that’s universal. That happens everywhere. Meeting the parents or even hanging out in the daytime is one of my favorites.

Just that idea of when you get to the place that you’re actually spending the weekend with somebody, time in, there’s You know, there’s no alcohol involved, although sober dating is also a thing. Gen Z is into regardless of time. But you really just have to look for what are those commonalities that you can spread everywhere.

And then on top of the global campaign. So it starts with the swipe as our positioning everywhere. It’s that campaign everywhere. Each of the markets have their own ability and marketers to help pivot it to something that’s super local to them. And so, In India, for example, they’re doing some really amazing work that’s much more rooted in the local culture.

Like they worked with a star cricket player and got him on Tinder and matched him up with a fan. And so you can type, you can tap into local nuances and local culture, but still keep it true to the overarching brand campaign, which for us is all about the possibilities of its star swipe.

Peter: Oh that’s great. And you’re right, it’s so hard to end up with something that is simple and elemental for a message and I think people who are. Outside of this field sometimes don’t understand, Hey, it’s like four words or something. What can be so hard? And the reality is it’s incredibly difficult to make sure that you can build a message.

And sometimes changing a word as part of a brand transition is incredibly powerful to go from one thing to the other as. As the world changes. I wanted to get into a little bit too that we’ve talked a lot about the overall the overall brand. And my head was going initially to the idea of customer acquisition, but in a marketplace model like yours, obviously not only do you need do you need customer acquisition, but you need retention, you need usage.

Talk about the role of your organization in driving all of those behaviors across the customer lifecycle.

Stephanie: Sure. So I am a huge believer that product is our. Ultimate strongest brand touchpoint. You know, I think it’s so tempting as marketers that we think about the flashy TV spend or billboards and that plays a role. Ultimately, your customer’s relationship with you is a hundred percent contingent on their product experience.

It’s where they spend the most time with your brand and it’s ultimately gonna make or break, you know, how they think of you and how they spend time with you. And so I actually started product marketing at Tinder. It’s kind of. Surprising that didn’t exist as a function within Tinder, but there really wasn’t a team of people thinking about how the brand needs to pull through in the product or.

How you connect the user journey all the way from the ad deep into the product. Or even we have so many features that people don’t even know about Tinder. And so how do we actually talk about those and get people using those? For example, we actually just launched a feature at the beginning of this year called relationship goals, where you can specify what you’re looking for and.

I think probably prior to product marketing existing, we would’ve just rolled that out and hoped people found out about it. But we actually. Heard so many people reconsidering Tinder because they found out about it. And relationships is very like Gen Z language. It’s how they talk about things. Right.

But getting to your point on life cycle, I do think. Look, the above the line stuff is so fun. I love that everybody’s excited about that, but I am a huge believer that you really need to carry through your brand into the product and into crm. And so we did think about, okay, if we’re talking about it starts with a swipe out there, how do we pull that through into the app store listing?

So, you know, we tested screenshots with this, with a swipe. Our signup page has that language, which then pulls through into. You know, our welcome emails our onboarding all of that kind of hope and optimism is something that we’ve been working on imbuing into the product. And we do think a lot about, even with our.

You know, with our targeting, making sure all of our above the line stuff is reaching the right demographic. Like Gen Z is the majority of people who are using Tinder, and that is where the majority of our marketing spend goes. And we especially target women and making sure that experience of what they’re seeing out in the world really pays off when they do hit the product, the experience pays off on what we’ve promised them.

Peter: Yeah it’s really interesting when you say you focus your marketing on women and you have a you have a. Slightly different kind of marketplace challenge than a lot of marketplaces, cuz it’s typically buyers and sellers. But this time you need partners. And obviously that’s not always just a man and a woman but more often than not, it is.

And so you need supply in demand on both sides to create that. So, so do you find that in some markets or in sometimes you have to sort of surge your demand creation or even customer re-engagement to sort of balance out so there’s enough supply. So,

Stephanie: Yeah. Well, well first of all, I’ll share. Gen Z is the most fluid generation yet, and the L G B T Q cohort has been very rapidly growing on Tinder. And so that’s actually a huge cohort that we target as well. And within it starts with a swipe. Nearly half of the couples that we showcased were L G B T, and more than half of the cast was non-white.

So we take diversity really seriously, and that’s a huge portion of our marketing. But overall, I think it’s mostly just about maintaining a balance. We found, I will say, when going back to when I launched ship and when I launched Stir, which is a single dating app for, excuse me, which is a dating app for single parents.

We did have to think about from the get go you’re starting with new liquidity and so how do you make sure that you target an equal marketplace? And with ship, actually in particular, a lot of our Mark Ment was working with our co-founders batches, which is a kind of a millennial media group, and so we found a lot of women coming in and we, you know, intentionally had to do more.

Male focused marketing to, to bring them in and balance it out. But within Tinder, we are so large. There are so many people that it’s not as much of a challenge in terms of surging, but we do kind of, our drumbeat marketing is really focused on women who women drive a lot of the activity within the ecosystem.

And and so, so we do have to. Just spend a little bit more on them. Men are a little bit easier to acquire into dating apps.

Peter: And what’s the basis of the economic model? Is it a subscription model? Are there other revenue levers that you can that you can pull inside? Tinder

Stephanie: Yeah, there are a number of subscriptions and a la carte offerings that we offer, and that is the vast majority of our revenue. We do have advertising as well, but it’s a relatively small percentage and so, subscriptions can get you. All kinds of different ways of making Tinder work a little bit more efficiently for you based off of whatever you’re looking for.

Peter: So is there and is this an element of your overall marketing as you are kind of upselling? Lane to, to different subscription rates and things like that, to, you know, find, so I assume I’m just. Amazed at the amount of data that you must have. And it presents a really interesting opportunity, one, to just understand what those individual cohorts need and and then to sort of create those products back to some of the product marketing stuff we’re talking about before, and then target those products and offers to that base.

Seems like a really interesting opportunity to you know, for the Tinder investors out there, right?

Stephanie: Yep. Yeah. We do have a number, like I said, of subscription and a l c and we are a freemium model, so the majority of the marketing that we focus on and especially top of funnel, is really focused on. Core Tinder and the value that you can get from it as you to spend time in Tinder. There are some, there are things like a super, like, which can show that you have special interest in someone and actually makes them, you know, it makes you stand out when they see you and makes them more likely to then also swipe right on you and like you and engage.

And so, we definitely do market that and there are different, Products that do different, better with different cohorts or different GOs. Even like incognito is a really popular reason for people to subscribe to Tinder which lets only people who. You’ve already liked, can see you. And so like that’s one that we’ve been leaning into more recently and that has helped drive a lot of growth.

I will say Tinder has less data than you probably think it does. You know, a lot of our, a lot of what’s really magical about Tinder has intentionally designed is it’s relatively light on filters. Intentionally. The, I, you know, you. You basically pick your geography, your age and what gender you’re seeking.

And that’s how we populate the people who show up for you. And so, as a result, you meet people on Tinder that you never would’ve met elsewhere. We hear that all the time. Stories of people who met their spouse and it was somebody that they never would’ve considered. I I have a former colleague who met her husband on Tinder, and she’s white.

She grew up in the church, Protestant, in a really small world town in Indiana, and she’s married to a Muslim man from Tunisia. And he’s and he celebrates Ramadan and she never would have pictured that for herself, but she found him on Tinder. And on other dating apps, you can filter by, by different buckets of things like race and religion and that near pool.

So Tinder has actually. It’s correlated with the rise in interracial marriages. But all that to say, we don’t have structured data about things like, like that. And so there is actually less targeting that we can do. You would think that people are putting so much informa information about themselves in their bio, but it’s all unstructured.

And so a lot of the data and insights that we’re doing are. Mine from, like, we have a group called Z Labs, which is a big group of single Gen Z people who, you know, tell us about how they’re dating and we can look at in aggregate, for example, situation ships as something that’s spiked in bios and we can kind of see the rise of trends like that.

But we actually don’t have as much first party data to be doing retargeting from. You know, a subscription standpoint. And so that’s its own challenge is figuring out like every tech marketer out there how you can get more efficient and effective and targeted and kind of balance that way.

Peter: Yeah, I’d imagine there’s an interesting kind of large language model AI opportunity here, right? Because the, and obviously you have to balance that with I know you’re very serious about privacy, so you have to make sure that you’re not. Getting even near that line. But but there probably are opportunities to look at data different ways, even if it’s super unstructured to to drive some interesting insights or recommendations.

Or I go, who knows, right? What the right thing is. Although it’s interesting because it’s one of those things that kind of flies in the face from that great story that you just told about, you know, the woman from the Midwest meeting, a guy from Tunisia. And if you get too smart about some of this targeting, are you gonna miss some of that magical serendipity?

What are your thoughts on that?

Stephanie: Yeah. And you know, we hear both sides of it from our users, both. I want you to curate for me and make it easier and save time. And then we also hear this. You know, I don’t even really know what I want or You know, I don’t wanna miss out on somebody because you filtered or curated for me.

And so we’re always testing new forms of technology and offering different ways for people to connect. I do, one of my favorite insights from working in the dating category is people who are single say, I know what I want. He should be this tall, he should make this much money and work in this type of field, and yada.

People who are in relationships say, if I could have, you know, waved a wand and invented my spouse, this is not who I would’ve ended up with. Because it is just this, you know, it’s just a magical element. You don’t really know what your ultimate click with. And so, I think our role is really introducing people and meeting you to people that you never would’ve expected.

And then some of those Are just gonna be okay dates, but maybe you walk away with a great new restaurant that you tried. Right. And some of those are gonna be people who are in your life forever, whether that’s as a friend or you know, as a spouse.

Peter: That’s fantastic. So believe it or not, we’re actually just about at the end of our time, and I always go so quickly and. Maybe because I dunno if I’m the only nerd who really gets into these conversations as we get deeply into marketing stuff, but both of our listeners probably appreciate it too.

The the last question though, we ask everyone Stephanie, is what advice would you give to current or aspiring CMOs.

Stephanie: I would say Do great creative that moves the business. So we talked about, I think number one, great creative should be really rooted in a core product or consumer truth. And that’s hard to get to, but once you get to it, it just feels so simple and clear and intuitive and so people will remember it and they’ll believe it.

And then number two is do creative. That scares you a little. You know, if an idea is safe or gets watered down it’s forgettable. The best ideas are ones that make you a little uncomfortable because they’re new or provocative. You know, they’re, and they’re unproven. And look, it’s not. It’s not all going to work, but the only way that you’re really gonna be able to build your brand over time and drive business results is if it’s absolutely true to your core product inequities.

And if it’s something that cuts through because it’s new and different.

Peter: Absolutely. And as Darwin told us, evolution only happens when there’s a mistake every once in a while. So, it’s, I completely agree. It’s really great advice. Stephanie. I really appreciate all the insights that you shared with us today and for your time. I really wanted to thank you and. I want to thank you all for listening to the podcast.

Make sure that you follow the next CMO and planful on Twitter and LinkedIn and all those great places. If you have ideas for topics or guests, you can email them to us at the next CMO planful.com. And make sure you check out my new company, accelerate Us for C M O Advisory Content, courses, and Community.

All the links are in the descriptions below. So thanks again, Stephanie, and have a great day.

Stephanie: Thank you.