ILoveGay.NET

By Alfred Verhoeven

Even though most of the word homosexuality consists of “sexuality”, I have limited my research to products and services that have nothing to do with it. I wanted to know whether gays (m/f) have a different regular spending pattern than the other consumers. Well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise: they’re just like other people when it comes to consuming.

In Marketing the Rainbow, I mainly looked for the if, why and how of mainstream brands and organizations that want to reach the LGBT consumer. This contrasts with “LGBT owned and operated” companies, such as Atlantis Events or clothing brand Aussiebum. In this article I want to look at the field of dating and matchmaking, activities that are based entirely on marketing. I’m not talking so much about the hookup sites, but about the platforms that go for a more serious relationship. Interesting discoveries arose from this.

Or: how companies can be forced to use gay marketing. First, one of the best known.

eHarmony

Founded in 2000 exclusively for straight people, eHarmony reached $1 billion in sales and 37 million members in 2009. Founded by the theologian Dr. Neil Clark Warren — and initially focused primarily on Christian sites — it should come as no surprise that no same-sex matchmaking was initially offered, unlike Yahoo, Match.com, and many other sites. They gave a scientific reason for it, claiming that their research and algorithmic matchmaking model was based only on heterosexual experience and facts.

When asked about the topic in 2005, Dr. Warren: “It takes very careful thought. Very careful research.” He added that “gay marriage” was illegal in most states: “We don’t really want to get involved in anything that is illegal.”

However, a lawsuit was filed against them in the state of New Jersey for violating the state law against discrimination. After three years of legal wrangling, eHarmony formed Compatible Partners in 2009 in response to the settlement that was reached. “While we felt the complaint resulted from an unfair characterization of our business, we ultimately decided it was best to settle with the Attorney General as the outcome of lawsuits can be unpredictable,” said eHarmony. By agreeing to the settlement, eHarmony did not admit to making any mistakes. That settlement required the company not only to offer gay dating services through an equivalent website, but also to advertise that new service on gay websites and include photos of “gay matches” in the “Diversity” section of its website. At the bottom of the page were also links for Blacks, Latinos, Jews, Christians, and seniors. The matching system’s algorithms were “refined to take into account the unique characteristics of same-sex relationships”.

At first, you had to Google for the link, but a few years later, candidates who signed up on the homepage and indicated they were looking for a same-sex partner would get a pop-up asking “Would you like to join Compatible Partners? ” – but there was no “No, I would like to stay on eHarmony” option: the services were completely separate. Compatible Partners attracted more than 200,000 members. In 2019, the service was integrated into the main website.

Pro-family conservatives who had once praised eHarmony’s efforts and helped publicize the site were “far from thrilled” with this development. “For those of us who applaud eHarmony’s commitment to the virtue of traditional marriage, the company’s actions are disturbing and damaging,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “Dr. Warren et al, you sold your soul (or at least eHarmony’s)…” added Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth about Homosexuality, in a letter to Dr. Warren, in which he also threatened to encourage singles to “use other dating services that haven’t sold their God and their moral beliefs for the almighty dollar.”

Remarkably, even before the launch of Compatible Partners, eHarmony became the sponsor of “The Newlywed Game” on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, which pitted a straight couple against Ellen and her wife Portia de Rossi. As one commenter posted, “Hey, even bigots in a bad economy have to make sacrifices.” The LA Times noted: eHarmony’s new relationship with the gay community is more like a “shotgun wedding”.

It took a while, but in 2020 we saw the episode “I scream” in the Here for Real Love campaign, where two enthusiastically kissing ladies had found each other. Last year, this campaign, which was broadcast in Canada and Australia, among other places, showed two gentlemen who, although they were just not kissing, did have – to complete the diversity checklist a little further – a different skin color.

Chemistry

A good follow-up to eHarmony’s original rejection policy came from Chemistry. In May 2007, many television viewers were shocked to see an ad depicting a man flipping through a girl’s magazine, laughing and tossing it aside, sighing, “Nope, still gay.” This was an especially remarkable communication, since it aired during network primetime, on huge mainstream hits like NBC’s Heroes. But the truly interesting thing about the ad was that it was for an online dating site not specifically designed for gay customers.

Chemistry.com, the more intimate spin-off of dating megasite Match.com, had launched a direct attack on its main competitor eHarmony through its successful ad campaign “Rejected by eHarmony”.

General Manager of Chemistry and Marketer of the Year in 2009, Mandy Ginsberg and her team focused on the No. 1 competitor and looked for a weakness in eHarmony’s armor. It wasn’t hard to find. “eHarmony was pretty adamant about not giving people the option to look for a same-sex partner,” she says. “It was an obvious aha moment.”

Ginsberg’s epiphany developed into an affecting ad, showing the face of a handsome young man with an ink stamp pounded across his forehead that read: REJECTED BY E-HARMONY. After explaining that eHarmony didn’t welcome gay consumers, the ad’s caption read: “At Chemistry.com, you can come as you are.” The ad is an example of Ginsberg’s willingness “to try new things and take risks.” The risk worked. After the “Rejected” ads ran, Chemistry.com’s awareness figures quadrupled, and the brand fostered untold numbers of matches. “Every day, 1,000 people leave the site,” Ginsberg says, “because they say they’ve found someone.”

After the launch of eHarmony’s Compatible Partners, Chemistry.com’s strategy changed from showing people “rejected by eHarmony” to citing the people behind eHarmony, and portraying them as bigoted, to tarnish their competitor’s image.

Parship

This is an international platform, that goes for the qualifier “The No. 1 in serious relationships”.

On their homepage you can cheerfully choose combinations of man & woman, while at the bottom – almost in the small print – it is states “Parship also has a website for gay singles: gayParship.nl.” If you click on “woman” on the main website, “man” is already ticked in the second column, while on the gay sister site the choice is prefilled for the same sex. That saves another 2 seconds.

Interestingly enough the website “gayParship” has an additional qualification: “online dating for highly educated gay singles”. Are they afraid that less educated people would use the site for more non-committal matters? That designation is not used on the hetero version – but it subtly refers to “relationships” instead of “dating”.

It is strange that on this page the four hyperlinks in the explanatory text blocks at the bottom (Homodating, Gay men, Woman seeking woman for relationship and Man seeking man for relationship) are all dead. It seems that the site is no longer being updated.

They also had a commercial in Spain and Austria, especially for the lesbians and gays.

Tinder

I would still like to make a crossover to the more frivolous match site Tinder, the Mother of Swiping, founded in 2012 during a hackathon. In 2014, Tinder registered about a billion daily “swipes” and reported that users logged in to the app on average 11 times a day. In 2015, Tinder was the fifth most profitable mobile app, and in 2019 it surpassed Netflix in annual spend.

They also manage to appear in the news. Vanity Fair wrote in 2015, about the degeneration of the dating and sex culture: “Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse”. BBC Newsnight came under fire for stereotyping gays after a presenter alleged that the dating app Tinder allowed “heterosexuals to act like gay men.” This was not appreciated by the BBC, not least by the LGBT community.

In 2019, Tinder teamed up with GLAAD to launch a feature that allows users to select up to three (!) different sexual orientations. In the same year, together with the ILGA they introduced a new safety feature for LGBT users when traveling to one of the 70 countries where being gay is still illegal.

At the same time, they presented The Museum of Queer Swipe Stories in collaboration with Gaysi, to showcase LGBT+ Swipe Stories. It was UGC, with some stories being made into a video clip. So, remarkably enough in India, for example Boo, Now What? and the Start Something Epic animation:

In the meantime, swiping had become boring for Gen Z. Tinder had come up with something for that: ‘Swipe Night’, a dynamic choose-your-own-adventure style experience – full of twists and turns and a series of realistic moral dilemmas that matched users based on the way they played. The campaign turned out to be a match made in heaven for daters and Tinder and was awarded the Entertainment Grand Prix at Cannes 2021 and nominated for a 2021 Daytime Emmy Award for Interactive Media. In 2021, Tinder brought us a bisexual version of the Swipe Night. Because with bi’s you can go in all directions, so that makes a murder mystery even more exciting!

Conclusion

Forced or not, the mainstream matchmaking platforms have also entered the rainbow market. Because ‘the product’ is slightly different, other processes had to be set up – and that has led to striking campaigns, moving videos and interesting collaborations.

Alfred Verhoeven is a marketer and is in the final phase of his PhD research Marketing the Rainbow. He previously wrote for ILOVEGAY about From Representation To Respect, Cultural sensitivities and social involvement in marketing, 4 reasons to practice diversity and The Rules of Market Segmentation.