Why Hinge is looking to give Gen Z tools to connect

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If you’re targeting Gen Z, it’s best not to sugarcoat a brand message.

The group is “really receptive to how brands communicate to them,” Tamika Young, Hinge’s chief marketing and communications officer, told us. “They can spot a mile away if something feels inauthentic.”

That insight helped shape Hinge’s “It’s Funny We Met on Hinge” brand platform, which chronicles the stories of real-life couples who met on the platform. The third iteration, “Can’t Believe we Met on Hinge,” rolled out this May and features couples reflecting on how they felt about online dating before meeting their partner.

Authenticity is also central to the brand’s IRL efforts, One More Hour, in which Hinge funds Gen Z-founded social and community groups to support more in-person connection, romantic or not.

Young, who stepped into the CMCO role at the end of last year, sat down with Marketing Brew at Cannes Lions to tell us about the brand’s honesty-first approach and its efforts to support more ways for Gen Z to connect..

On efforts to message honestly about dating: We took a step back and really looked at the conversations that were happening in dating more broadly, and we wanted to be able to showcase seven couples across the US, UK, and Australia, and to really identify some of the vulnerabilities and the skepticism that they were feeling in those moments right before they met their partner on Hinge. There’s also this hope and optimism around being able to find a relationship. It was interesting for us as a team as we were thinking about these narratives, because it’s the first time that we’ve been so overtly acknowledging the hardships that were happening in the dating landscape right now. But for us, we don’t want to be disingenuous.

On giving Gen Z the tools to connect: It’s not even from a romantic perspective, it’s just really about people being able to lean into the social skills that they need to really help them when they do want to go out on a date. We’ve seen in some of our research that Gen Z, primarily, is spending about 1,000 less hours of connection time in person compared to the same generation two decades ago. That’s staggering when you hear that. How do you think about being able to help people step into these spaces where they feel a level of comfort, help them lean into the awkwardness? Because it is hard going out there and just going up to someone and saying, “Hey, I want to, potentially, have your number,” or, “Would you like to have a conversation with me?” We want to be able to lower the pressure for people as they step into these environments that might feel a little bit uncomfortable.