Hinge Launches a Zine with Stories Written by Literary Stars
Contributed by: kellyseal on Monday, September 16 2024 @ 04:02 pm
Last modified on Monday, September 16 2024 @ 04:13 pm
Dating app Hinge has taken marketing its product to a new level by creating an online zine with stories of six real-life Hinge couples. The anthology series is written by literary stars like Roxanne Gay, John Paul Brammer, R. O. Kwon, Isle McElroy, Oisín McKenna and Brontez Purnell, and is titled “No Ordinary Love.”
According to Marketing Dive[*1] , the anthology plays into Hinge’s current marketing campaign of “Designed to be Deleted.” The campaign is meant to encourage people to get off the app and meet each other in real life, and that most love stories aren’t linear and straightforward, and that’s okay.
The anthology is live with a dedicated website (no-ordinary-love.co[*2] ) and will also exist as an 80-page print zine that will be available in New York and London starting September 9th.
The campaign is intended to attract Gen Z daters, who gravitate to platforms like TikTok for book recommendations and reviews. Romance stories are growing in popularity and much-discussed by young people on social feeds, especially on TikTok, so Hinge’s campaign is intended to meet these daters where they go for fiction in the hopes of inspiring people to live their own real-life love stories.
“The authenticity of our work is what helps us encourage young adults to try Hinge,” CMO Jackie Jantos told Marketing Dive. “I think doing that in a way that leans into content formats they’re curious about is another way for them to be exposed to some of those stories.”
She went on to say: “In many ways, we’re always innovating in how we reach this audience, how we engage with them and how we’re useful to them.”
One story details the hesitancy of meeting a date for the first time:
“Najib…opened Hinge to study Chanti’s profile and remind himself of what he was waiting for…there was something about her eyes and her voice and how much she seemed to make the most of every single moment of every single day. He was either going to love all that energy or hate it.”
And this from a love story where neither person wanted anything serious, but found themselves falling in love with a city and each other:
“It was around this time that a particular thought began to bloom in Rahul’s mind: London was opening up to him. He had thought that a relationship would mean staying in, settling down, stagnation. But George had made his world bigger and richer, made London more vivid.”
The campaign was produced by Dazed Studio (the in-house creative agency of lifestyle magazine Dazed.