Last month, Tinder took two big steps towards establishing the brand in India. One, the dating app announced that it was setting up its first international office in Delhi. Two, it appointed its first India head, Taru Kapoor.
The next natural step was marketing. For this, the Los Angeles company recently collaborated with The Viral Fever, one of India’s biggest online entertainment companies.
“One of the reasons for having an India office is to focus on Indian users and what they need,” Kapoor had told Quartz in January.
This week, the TVF team released a YouTube sketch called Eat, Pray…Swipe. The title takes off on Eat, Pray and Love, the 2010 Julia Roberts-starrer and Elizabeth Gilbert’s book by the same name.
“Most of the project members are regular Tinder users, so they knew the product like the back of their thumb,” Arunabh Kumar, CEO and founder of TVF, told Quartz. “We had the bandwidth and the love for the product.”
The comedic sketch, a little over 11 minutes, follows Harish Chandra – a coder by profession – and the women he meets after he downloads Tinder for the first time.
Tinder entered India in 2013, and less than three years on, the dating app is now looking to make India its largest market. Last September, the dating app said it gets 7.5 million daily swipes in India. Globally, Indian users have the highest number of messages exchanged per match. Tinder even witnessed a 400% increase in downloads in India from November 2014 to November 2015.
Even before Tinder decided to collaborate with TVF, Indian YouTubers have been curious about its different aspects.
TVF itself had created a short parody of the movie, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (roughly translated into “you only live once”), with Tinder as the backdrop. The video was called Match Na Milega Dobara (“You only match up once”). Parroting the Bollywood movie’s storyline, the parody was about three desperate Tinder addicts who make a trip to Europe to celebrate a friend’s Tinder match. However, soon they realise that meeting a woman in person was much better.
There are several others, including an instructive video on the kinds of Indian women a man can expect to meet on a Tinder date.
Quartz has emailed Tinder for comment on their marketing initiatives, and will update when it replies.
This article was first published on Quartz.
