Bumble has repositioned itself, from a dating application to an application which helps to develop networks, by using digital as a new social media.
Bumble, the origins
Whitney Wolfe had a bad experience while she was working for one of Bumble’s competitors, Tinder. Since that time, she wants to create a more equal dating application for men and women. At the beginning Bumble was just a dating app, the main target is women/men, and W. Wolfe defines it as people aged between 18 years and 35 years old, even because of the concept, it is more focused on women (read the article "Bumble: women have control" to learn more). The positioning of the application is to create real connections between people and find longer-lasting relationships. Some analyses also define the target, as people living in big cities, because the application does not yet have a sufficient number of users in some places, which means that in small cities the profiles are not renewed, which does not encourage registration.
Bumble’s repositioning
W. Wolfe doesn’t see Bumble as a simple dating application. That is why in 2016, two years after the launching, she added the “BFF mode”, which is a new way to make friends. One year later, the company launched the “Bizz mode”, to meet professionals of your field and develop your network by meeting new colleagues or even by finding a mentor. Women still have to make the first step by the way! The objective of Bumble is no longer to be only a dating application but a real space to meet different types of people according to users’ expectations, with qualitative discussions and meetings. By developing these new features, it allows to expand Bumble’s targets, therefore to broad the potential audience.
These two new features don’t bring as much as traditional Bumble dating mode; however, the perspectives of growth are optimistic, mostly for the “Bizz mode”, there are many positive returns of experience in media. Currently, the users would be entrepreneurs and owners of small/medium companies, the application will be helpful to exchange, share and meet on business, in addition what makes it different from LinkedIn is that it uses geo-localization, to connect people from the same regions. The only point reflected in the media is that Bumble is still a dating application, and it can be difficult to differentiate the different modes, moreover, there are still people using Bizz or BFF mode for dating. The “BFF mode”, is also appreciated, according to the mentions in the last two years many users would have met friends (Digimind research).
W. Wolfe is attached to her values and feels concerned about the impacts of her application, she said: “the behaviours on my platform are my responsibility”. Her vision is to create a real platform of networking and meeting in a safe environment, she named it: a better internet.
Fiona Vandevelde
480 words.
References:
Image of Bumble.
Bumble. 2021. Bumble - Date, Meet, Network Better. [online] Available at: < https://bumble.com/en/ > [Accessed 20 October 2021].
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