eHarmony is a premium online dating site that focuses mainly on singles in search of serious, long-term relationships. eHarmony was founded by Dr. Neil Clark Warren and Greg Forgatch in 1998 and was launched in 2000 after receiving $3 million from a Houston investment firm. eHarmony targets marriage-minded individuals and offers a unique product which combines a patented matching system, an extensive relationship questionnaire and a guided communication system. Presently, eHarmony owns 13.9% of the online dating market with over 20 million registered users. Key pressing issues facing eHarmony include; imitations of its business model by competitor companies, encroachment by competing models and ascendance of free substitutes. Competitors …show more content…
Many online dating websites have copied eHarmony’s scientific matching service in attempt to gain more customers and thus market share. For example, Match’s new dating site, Chemistry offers a similar match-making service like eHarmony but is priced at about 10% below. Growth in the online dating industry is mainly based on aggressive advertising by industry players. In this regard March has increased its advertising expenditure by 80% percent. This is a show of intent from eHarmony’s biggest competitor as regards to capturing a larger market share from competitors such as eHarmony.eHarmony like other personal sites faced competition from large social networks such as MySpace and Facebook who did not have to incur huge advertising expenses to attract customers, instead relying on a “viral” process though friends. b. Technological Advancements Technological advancement has been key to growth of eHarmony. The expansion of its TV and radio offering enabled eHarmony hit 3 million registrations by early spring 2004. Social media acts as a medium that allows the company to reach more potential users through advertisements and awareness campaigns. This lowers eHarmony’s advertising costs due to the fact that placing adverts on the social media is cheap and expands coverage of the advertisements. Today, a large number of people have access to smartphones and tables which …show more content…
eHarmony distinguished itself from other personal sites by offering a tightly integrated system that encompassed a personality profile, which fed into a matching algorithm, which then led into a guided communication. Users would answer 258 questions covering 29 measures of compatibility. The matching algorithm would connect people with at least 25 similarities in compatibility and inform both individuals. The individuals would then send to the other person 5 easy multi-choice questions provided by eHarmony. Once both parties answered they advanced to the next stage where they were asked on “must-haves” and “cant-haves”. They would finally ask 3 open-ended questions and move to open