Gillette ventures onto Tinder for marketing experiment

Gillette has partnered up with Tinder for a brilliant piece of “research” which defies the conventional rules of traditional advertising.Using Tinder, Gillette set out to test the theory that that having facial hair wasn't a popular trait amongst the ladies - especially when you have only two seconds to make an impression.The experiment saw a 100,000 gruff looking male Tinder users being recruited by the brand to see how many favourable swipes they could accumulate. After a week, the same guys injected in some well-groomed, clean shaven pictures of themselves to see which sat well with women.Here’s a hilarious snippet of the experiment:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSYaRgKYeekResults, hosted on a separate microsite Shavetest.com, showed that well-groomed men apparently received 74% of the total right swipes (which is favourable) and 37% more matches with ladies. Meanwhile, nine out of 10 women also said that well-groomed men are more attractive.Click here to see other interesting results: [gallery link="file" ids="80565,80566,80567,80568,80570"]How legitimate are the results? We don’t know. But what we do know is that the new trend of keeping facial hair has over the years been quite a hair-raising situation for Proctor & Gamble. Last year, the company’s CFO Jon Moeller told Financial Times that hipsters were partially to blame along with the growing influence of Movember for the company’s loss in revenue.Another aspect the campaign also highlights is the growth of Tinder amongst main stream audiences and advertisers.Last year, Fox Entertainment paired up with Tinder to promote hit comedy show "The Mindy Project". Mindy, the protagonist of the show, along with the fictional cast had their very own tinder profile. When Tinder users swiped favourably on the characters, they were sent a message to tune in to the show. Speaking to CNBC, a Tinder spokeswoman had then said the profile was not an ad but a partnership with Fox.Tinder no doubt has the monetising scheme on the top of its mind. Late last year it launched Tinder Plus which let users experience a premium service by undoing swipes and change locations. Bloomberg also reported that IAC, parent company of Tinder said that it had plans to start monetizing the fast growing dating app and could potentially bring in as much as US$75 million a year.