The Grindr brand hasn’t been taken care of, according to Tristan Pineiro, Senior Vice President of Brand Marketing and Communications.

The LGBTQ dating app has 90% brand awareness within the queer community and has grown to 14.5 million monthly active users worldwide without significant marketing investments. But while the app is a huge success in many ways, the brand perception isn’t consistent and is frequently negative, Pineiro said.

“There’s a fair amount of stigma around the fact that we’re seen as a gay hookup app,” he said. “We’re on a path to de-stigmatize Grindr and to ensure that we’re in culture and in conversation as the real connector of the community, which is what we’ve actually become.”

So the marketing team is tasked not with increasing brand awareness, but with increasing positive brand engagement, he said.

“Our strategy with marketing is very much to entertain our audiences with content and to dispel the view that Grindr is just a hookup app. And the problem with that sentence isn’t the ‘hookups,’ it’s the word ‘just,’” Pineiro said. “Because we’re a lot more than hookups. We’re a way to connect the community for them to find each other, to find friendship, to find relationships, whether they be permanent or temporary.”

Grindr’s Second Season of ‘Daddy Lessons’ 

To that end, Grindr has rolled out a series of content that educates and tells stories about the LGBTQ community. The most recent initiative is the second season of its series “Daddy Lessons,” which are 90-second social videos on a queer history topic that might be unknown to Gen Z and millennials. Topics this season include the jockstrap, body building, the limp wrist, Alan Turing and The Kinsey Report.

Grindr distributes the content in its app and on its owned social channels including TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. The short content is meant to cater to the limited attention spans of younger consumers. The brand also publishes a blog with more details for users who are interested in learning more.

“With some rights under threat across the globe and locally as well, then it’s more important than ever to share these stories, to record them and to share them so that people know whose shoulders they’re standing on,” Pineiro said. “And so that history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself.”

After the first two episodes, the content series has had 493,000 views and 12,5000 engagements. This builds up the success of its first season, which was released in October 2024, which had 3 million views, 187 engagements and 15,000 new followers. Beyond the 3 million views, Season 1 generated 3.4 million in-app opens. Comparing the first two episodes of Season 2 to Season 1, it’s had a 16% increase in views. Going forward Grindr plans to have two seasons a year.

The first series took about six to eight weeks to produce, but was shorter the second time around.

The goal is to get users talking about its content, to increase its brand affinity and to attract media coverage from both LGBTQ and consumer publications. The brand measures sentiment via brand trackers, measuring conversations online in Reddit forums and in media.

The brand wants to “re-balance” the coverage about Grindr and produce positive stories about success stories on the platform, history, travel and other use cases for the brand. Grindr wants to improve its brand perception both to the general population and within its own community.

“No one was really running down the street shouting, I’m on Grindr, and it’s great.’ It was just something that people weren’t really proud of,” he said. “And to a certain extent, that is a problem as well. And that’s probably to do with the perception that it’s a hookup app and that there’s something wrong with hookups, and there’s a lot of stigma around sex and gay sex,” Pineiro said.

“So by us being proud about who we are, putting positive stories out there, celebrating our community, creating content that has our community front and center as the hero there, is going a long way to challenge these perceptions,” he said.

Overall, Grindr’s content initiatives are working, as it’s had consecutive quarters of growth and its stock price has increased to $24 from $6 in the past few years. When it first embarked on content as a marketing strategy, it struggled to book well-known people to be featured, as they were hesitant to be associated with Grindr. Now, people are approaching Grindr to be featured on its content.

“That alone to me is an indicator that we’re de-stigmatizing the brand to a certain extent,” Pineiro said.