With its latest marketing campaign, Whirlpool is helping guys “spring clean” their dating profiles. In a first-of-its-kind social experiment, the appliance brand joined forces with dating app users to prove the brand can do more than help clean up consumers’ homes.

Clean is cool

As a basis for its “Care Profiles” initiative, Whirlpool surveyed dating app users about were looking for in a match and found that 94% of people are looking for “equity around house chores.” Other important factors included the ability to do basic chores properly, especially laundry and dishes. The survey also revealed that “64% of single, online daters prefer photos of a potential match cooking a meal over working out at the gym.”

To see if these findings aligned with real-world experiences, Whirlpool took their spring-cleaning program into the wild. Working with seven Chicago-based dating app users, the brand hired a team to refresh their profiles, creating new profile pictures for the participants and replacing their inferior gym selfies, fish photos, and car poses with ones of them cooking, cleaning and doing laundry (while using Whirlpool products, of course).

Making meaningful connections

The result? The new profile pics helped the bachelors make a lot more connections and even find relationships:

“Compared to a three-week timespan before the experiment, the bachelors saw on average 79% more DM’s, 46% more matches and 100% more connections. Furthermore, four of the seven participants are now in a relationship.”  

Nelly Martinez, senior brand leader for Whirlpool brand remarked:

“We know that equity of chores is not only perceived as attractive, it is also fundamental to creating a caring household. With so many relationships starting online, our goal with the ‘Care Profiles’ campaign is to give people a way to express what’s important to them and hopefully spark a conversation about these values from the very beginning.”

When developing this campaign, Whirlpool creatively used its positioning within the household appliance industry to capitalize on the concept of “keeping it clean” and showcased all the ways its appliances can improve consumers’ everyday lives – sometimes, in the most unexpected of ways.