The Project Challenge

The client, Blythe Roberson, contracted McKinsey & Company to develop a strategy to improve her dating life. According to the client, ideal improvement would consist of "getting to kiss good hot boys who are artistic and nice or, at the very minimum, not sexist or, like, actually crazy."

It may be useful to lay out a few key terms frequently used by the client, which will likely come up in this report. Finding the term "hooking up" distasteful, the client refers to the act instead as "kissing," "smooching," or "boning." Men are referred to as "boys," and a casual hookup partner is called a "jump-off." Men determined to promise a low return on investment are called "dickdarts" or "trash boys." Though not a specialized term, it should be noted that the client frequently uses the word "patriarchy" when describing why she doesn't have a boyfriend.

The Client's Objectives

The client’s primary objective is to increase net kissing by forty per cent by the end of 2015.

Client Profile

The McKinsey team conducted extensive research to better understand the client's romantic history and past dating practices. This included interviews with the client, analysis of her Gchats and text messages, reading all of her tweets, and watching every episode of every Web series she has ever made.

Ms. Roberson has smooched a smattering of boys, ranging from pretty good to horrible. One such horrible boy, whom the McKinsey team found particularly disturbing, left Ms. Roberson in order to engage in some sort of spirit journey across the American West. When the client asked the boy where, exactly, he had ended up, the boy responded, "Have any of us really ended up anywhere?" The team determined that helping the client avoid this kind of boy would be a key objective of the project.

Ms. Roberson is heavily influenced both by feminist theory and the movies of Nora Ephron, and simultaneously believes that no one should be in a relationship until she is thirty, and that she should seriously have a boyfriend already. While she has made claims over a variety of media that she absolutely does not believe in love, she talks about it nonstop and hosts a monthly sketch-comedy show about it.

Addressing the Challenge

The McKinsey team has suggested that the client immediately integrate dating apps into her approach, as these apps will drastically increase her chances of finding a partner in a highly competitive marketplace. Unfortunately, the client met this suggestion with a full seven and a half minutes of fake puking. She then stated that she prefers to date people with whom she's already close friends. "That way, when they reject me, I know it was an informed decision," she explained. Note: the client was openly weeping when she said this.

We additionally provided Ms. Roberson with a number of image-improvement suggestions. (One such proposal was that Ms. Roberson lessen the frequency with which she tweets about her menstrual cycle.) All of these recommendations were summarily dismissed.

The team attempted to coach Ms. Roberson to better manage her time—encouraging her to spend less of it making art about the boys she is obsessed with and more of it attempting to communicate her feelings to them. The team noted that eventually this behavioral shift might help reduce the number of Google results for the client's name that are about how she is a romantic psychopath.

To improve performance technique, the team accompanied the client on what she alternately referred to as "maybe a date" and "definitely just a platonic hangout; what are you talking about?" Though she later insisted that she'd been "sending signals," the team only observed her sitting motionless and silent until the topic of Taylor Swift finally came up.

In the course of this project, the client quite obviously developed a crush on a McKinsey associate consultant, before lamenting to a different consultant that the object of her crush was "too conventional."

Project Outcome

The McKinsey team does see some amount of potential for the client's romantic life, but was unable to convince her to implement any of our solutions. As such, we arrive at the conclusion that Ms. Roberson will most likely continue to pseudo-date exclusively trash boys. We wish her the best of luck.