Remember the stories of how your parents, or even your grandparents met? People used to meet each other through different people, in the supermarket, at work, or even through blind dates! These traditional romantic stories have gone away and technology has crept into the romantic lives of people. With the invention of social media it is difficult to imagine anyone going on a blind dates again.
The adoption of technology has changed the way we connect and converse with others in our society and dating is no exception. Due to mobile phones we are always contactable. Furthermore, as a result of social media we get to know people even before we have met them and dating apps gives us an abundance of choice in suitable partner. Technology has disrupted the dating scene!
Is Tinder an innovative disruptor?
Take Tinder. Tinder has become extremely successful due to that an incumbent provider decided to disrupt itself rather than get disrupted by others. Tinder is a dating application for mobile phones. It was set up in 2012 by the incubator Hatch Labs which owns dating site like Match.com, Chemistry.com, Peoplemdia and OKCupid. By 2014, it had generated one billion matches, 800 million swipes and 10 million matches per day as well as 300 marriage proposals. Moreover, it had over 28% of the $2.1 billion dating service market and stole the majority of the user’s from incumbent providers!
What makes Tinder different from the rest?
Tinder provides a different experience to online dating sites as it provides instant gratification. It’s easy, affordable and fun to use due to Tinders innovation of the swipe. You sign on with Facebook, so forget about the lengthy dating profile questionnaires, and within minutes your judging singles in your area swiping right if you like the look of them and swiping left if you don’t. If you both swipe, right it’s a match. Tinder combines social, mobility and analytics in a way that creates a captivating user experience. Since the rise of Tinder online dating has increased to 60% on mobile devices versus 40% using desktops. Having said all this, in my opinion Tinder is a genuine disruptive innovator!
With the rise of more applications like Tinder, Happn and Hinge the dating scene will probably never be the same.
References:
(2016). Tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com. Retrieved 21 September 2016, from https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/screen-shot-2015-01-16-at-9-32-53-am.png?w=680&h=406
BBC News – The dating game. (2016). BBC News. Retrieved 21 September 2016, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-2e3f0042-75f6-4bd1-b4fe-9056540c65f8
Stampler, L. (2014). Inside Tinder: Meet the Guys Who Turned Dating Into an Addiction. TIME.com. Retrieved 21 September 2016, from http://time.com/4837/tinder-meet-the-guys-who-turned-dating-into-an-addiction/
Tinder mobile app statistics and revenue – App Industry Insights. (2015). Business of Apps. Retrieved 21 September 2016, from http://www.businessofapps.com/tinder-mobile-app-statistics-and-revenue/
Thanks for your interesting post on disruptive innovation.
Considering Tinder a disruptive innovation makes for an interesting example of an incumbent firm that is able to develop and successfully implement a disruptive innovation. As we have seen in the past (and as I wrote in my blogpost on Polaroid), incumbent firms have the tendency to become resource-dependent by listening too close to their current customers. Tinder, however, has found a way to persuade consumers to use the mobile app.
If we take the classic theory of Christensen (1997) and combine it with revised disruptive theory of Sood & Tellis (2011), and apply it to Tinder, I see the following. First, Tinder can be considered disruptive to conventional dating websites, as Tinder outperforms the incumbent technology at the time of its introduction; it’s faster, easier in use, less details to fill in, etc. This follows the line of reasoning of Sood & Tellis (2011), who state a disruptive technology can also outperform the incumbent technology at the time of introduction. Second, Christensen (1997) argues disruptive technologies/innovations are merely developed by startups or market entrants due to inertia and/or resource dependence. Now, as we see, the firm behind Tinder was an incumbent in its respective market and successfully developed and implemented a disruptive innovation. As such, again, the line of reasoning of Sood & Tellis (2011) is being followed.
Summing up, according to Christensen’s (1997) quite conservative line of thinking, Tinder would not be considered a disruptive innovation. However, I prefer to follow Sood & Tellis (2011): Tinder is indeed disruptive!
References:
Christensen, C. (1997) ‘The innovator’s dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail’, Boston: Harvard Business Review.
Sood, A. & Tellis, G. (2011) ‘Demystifying Disruption: A New Model for Understanding and Predicting Disruptive Technologies’, Marketing Science, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 339-354.
I really liked your point of view on the dating industry Christianne. I also agree with Lars that I would consider Tinder as a serious industry disruption.
There is no doubt in the fact that Tinder has changed the dating industry. However, the thing that I am concerned with is the privacy of its customers. Tinder shows the distance between customers on the application. I think it is possible for people to hack the application and find out the precise location of customers. This could result in some serious stalking issues, which I think should be prevented in the first place. Tinder must keep updating its security system in order to protect the customers privacy and I also think that Tinder must take very good care of the gathered data from its customers.
Secondly, I believe that Tinder has a lot of pro’s in comparison with traditional dating sites. Only by avoiding the long questionnaires that are required by traditional dating sites as Christianne mentioned, Tinder makes online dating accessible to everyone.
Lastly, I am still a firm believer in ‘a book doesn’t get judge by its cover’. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I am convinced that you cannot know if you match with someone just by appearance. I am sure that people have a lot of fun with the app, but I still hope that I have a better story to tell my grandchildren then ‘Grandma just swiped right and Grandma and Grandpa lived happily ever after’.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2014/02/18/tinder-dating-app-users-are-playing-with-privacy-fire/#6b6d0dc36758