The Bumble Fumble: A Case Study in Misguided Re-Branding

In the ever-evolving world of dating apps, Bumble has long positioned itself as a platform promoting female empowerment and control in the dating scene. Their mission was to support the idea that women can and should be active participants in their romantic lives.

So when their recent rebrand (We’ve Changed So You Don’t Have To) involved denouncing celibacy, it completely missed the mark. The result was significant backlash, causing the now-infamous campaign to be referred to as "the Bumble Fumble." Let’s dive into where Bumble went wrong and what we can learn from their mistakes. It might prove enlightening for brands and marketers.

Marketing 101: Understanding your audience

This rebrand gone wrong is a symptom of Bumble’s core problem: they don't understand their audience. A large majority of Bumble’s audience are Gen Z and Millenial women, and the rejection of dating is a growing trend among this demographic.

Described as “patronising, disrespectful, out of touch” by many women on TikTok, the campaign ultimately failed to understand that women are rejecting hook-up culture due to its perceived toxicity and danger.

When launching a digital campaign, it’s vital to understand and engage in the discourse within the community you’re targeting. At a time when women were having an online discussion about why they would rather be alone in the woods with a bear than a man, this campaign was destined to spark scrutiny.

Bumble’s failure to grasp the significance of voluntary celibacy and other nuanced issues has led to a disconnect with their audience, causing many to call for women to boycott the app.

Sending the wrong message

Mocking celibacy as an invalid — or even foolish — choice ignores the reality of why women reject hook-ups and dating in the first place. Not to mention it removes the asexual orientation from the conversation altogether.

Implying that this is an issue to be rectified by changing a few in-app features dismisses domestic violence, trauma, and restrictions on reproductive rights as reasons for celibacy.

One Instagram commenter said it best; “Why doesn’t your next campaign focus on men changing their bad behaviour instead of telling women to lower their standards and boundaries?”

Indeed, this campaign missed a crucial opportunity to address the concerns of women who feel increasingly disenfranchised by the dating landscape. The creative concept had potential, but this particular execution should have been vetoed early in the development phase.

This whole fiasco proves the importance of tone. Humour was misplaced, and it came across as trivialising some very serious issues — major copywriting fail. For a company like Bumble where creating a safe and empowering space for women is the primary selling point for membership revenues, it’s just not a smart business move.

Overpromising and underdelivering

Another key principle of marketing is to make sure your audience trusts you, and again Bumble failed to do this.

Positioning the rebrand as a “wake-up call” and promising changes that would revolutionise the dating experience, the campaign was underwhelming when users discovered that the only new feature was the ability for men to message women first.

When you make grand claims and fall short, you’ll inevitably damage trust and credibility with your audience. In Bumble's case, this mistake has made it even more challenging to attract and retain users in an already competitive market.

Rather than revolutionary, it just actually seemed regressive — in the context that Bumble’s very reason for existing in the first place was to subvert this dynamic. They’re changing the one thing that made customers loyal to them in the first place.

In-house creation without external insight

When executing a campaign on a large scale, gathering external feedback is a must before launching it to the public. Developing the campaign internally might have been a key reason that Bumble failed to recognise the problematic elements of their ads. Handling campaigns in-house can create an echo chamber where ideas are not sufficiently challenged. How not one person managed to catch their mistake before this went to print is dumbfounding.

This absence of external feedback, which could have provided valuable criticism through a fresh lens, is likely the reason this tone-deaf campaign got to see the light of day. Incorporating diverse viewpoints in creative processes makes sure campaigns resonate positively with the intended audience. An in-house creative team has its upsides, but in this case outsourcing a socially conscious marketing agency would have saved their skin.

So what can we learn from this? The backlash from this campaign was immediate, and most importantly, avoidable.

This failed rebrand offers a valuable case study on knowing your audience, nailing your messaging, not overpromising, and seeking external feedback during campaign development. Here, thorough research into women’s sentiments about dating was the missing puzzle piece.

Most importantly, the campaign demonstrates both the tangible and not-so intangible costs of failing to appeal to the zeitgeist of the time, and demonstrates exactly what not to do when rebranding.