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Action Plan: Finding Fluency

Photo courtesy of Cammie Dunaway
Every day of 2020, Cammie Dunaway (MBA 1990) has practiced her French using the Duolingo app. “It is something positive I can do for myself,” Dunaway says of the hobby she has maintained throughout COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. “It also lets me daydream about the trip to Paris I’m going to get back on the calendar someday.”
Dunaway, the chief marketing officer for Duolingo, is not alone in her desire to use her time in quarantine for self-improvement. Interest in the nine-year-old language-learning company’s app is an accidental timeline of the COVID era: Duolingo saw a 101 percent increase in users in March 2020, as many countries put travel restrictions in place. In the United States, new downloads jumped by 66 percent the week of March 16. In the United Kingdom, they increased 296 percent the week of March 23.
For Dunaway, the pandemic meant rethinking all of the company’s marketing plans. A veteran of established brands such as Frito-Lay, Yahoo, and Nintendo, Dunaway joined Duolingo in 2018 to build a marketing department from scratch with a focus on acquiring new users worldwide. “We had started the year really trying to be disciplined about a marketing calendar with 16-week lead times,” Dunaway recalls. Plans for April Fool’s Day and Olympics-related campaigns went out the window. “We had to ask: What are the needs that consumers have right now that we are uniquely positioned to solve?”
Overnight, Duolingo shifted from being a tool for travelers to a classroom assistant for parents educating their children at home and a much-needed distraction for adult learners. Marketing evolved, too, responding to these new and changing consumer demands. The team—working remotely in locales ranging from China to the American Northwest—now re-evaluates its plans on a weekly basis, tracking consumer sentiment regionally to adjust the tone of campaigns in real time.
“I think being really agile is something that strong marketing organizations are going to have to get better and better at,” Dunaway says. “I don’t think we’re ever going to go back to the world of 16-week planning cycles.”
How to: Find New Customers
Look nearby. “Think about adjacent categories for your company,” Dunaway advises. Duolingo has launched Duolingo ABC to teach reading to young children. “That’s bringing parents to the brand.”
Circle the globe. Duolingo has users worldwide, but awareness of the brand is low in many countries. “There’s a lot of opportunity in markets where people haven’t been exposed to the product.”
Court the influencers. Social media mavens provide a warm introduction for new customers. “It’s been a successful practice for us in markets as diverse as India and Mexico,” Dunaway says.
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