GEN Z IS READY TO BREAK UP WITH TINDER, AND THESE NEW DATING APPS ARE HERE FOR THE REBOUND BY JAIMIE DINGSTAFF WRITER (FEB. 11, 2022) With Valentines Day looming, Steven Coyle was on his phone looking for a date but not on Tinder. The 26-year-old from Las Vegas used an app called Snack to scroll through videos of women walking down the street, showing off their outfits, or lip-syncing to the camera. One caught his eye a tall, pretty blond recording herself walking through Disney California Adventure Park to the Avengers Campus, where she ordered a cocktail at the bar. She looks fun, he thought. He pressed a heart to like. Coyle had stumbled upon Snack, an app that bills itself as TikTok meets Tinder, just a few days earlier. Its one of a handful of innovative dating apps that are trying to capture the attention of Gen Z, many of whose members say they are tired of the apps that have dominated the online dating scene for nearly a decade Bumble, Hinge and, above all, Tinder, which popularized the now-ubiquitous swipe to match user interface. Looking for love with someone who shares your Myers-Briggs personality type, or your love of video games? Want to see a blurry photo of your prospective partner that gets progressively sharper the longer you chat? The options abound. Heterosexual couples in the U.S. are now more likely to meet a romantic partner online than via any other mode of connection. A 2017 survey found 39% of such couples reported meeting their partner online, compared with 22% in 2009. Nearly half of all 18- to 29-year-olds say they have used a dating app in their life, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study. And during the pandemic, online dating reached new heights with Bumble reporting a 70% increase in video calls and Tinder exceeding 3 billion swipes in one day for the first time in March 2020. Underscoring its intention to court a new generation of daters, Snack eliminated the swipe gesture in favour of pressing a heart button or sending a message. Swiping is 10 years old now, said Kaplan, who was one of the first employees at Match.com and involved with the dating app Plenty of Fish, which eventually was sold for $575 million. Thats not all thats been freshened up. Users upload TikTok-style videos instead of photos, theres no field for a bio, and you can even upload videos to an Instagram-style story that people can view after you match with them. TikTok, where Snack advertises, played a major role in its creation. Kaplan was scrolling through the app one day in early 2020 when she came across a video of a woman introducing herself with her name, age and star sign. Her caption included the hashtag #single. Kaplan realized she had discovered an entire underbelly of dating already occurring on TikTok. It clicked: A video-first dating app was the logical next evolution of dating. She encouraged her Gen Z employees and investors to incorporate their voices and feedback into the development of Snack. They told her most people of their generation only used the swiping apps because they had to, preferring to move the conversation to a more casual social media platform such as Instagram or Snapchat as quickly as possible. Taking a page from the early days of Tinder, the company is focusing on on-the-ground promotion at college campuses and currently has the most users in California, Texas, Florida and New York. The free app is available only to those aged 18 to 35.

The marketing environment is made up of a micro-environment and a macro-environment. Based on the information in the case study, provide the following. 2.1 Refer to evidence in the case study pointing to the presence of competitors in the micro-environment. 2.2 Identify TWO (2) macro-environmental factors highlighted in the case study. Refer to information in the case study to support your answers.