E harmony, the match making company was founded by Dr. Neil Clark Warren and Greg Forgatch in 1998. The company business is to provide right partners to their customers. Now the company is struggling to overcome their competitors. This summary discusses about that how they are going to address the recent competitor actions.
To start with modern marriage markets, the marriage rate had reached its lowest point. Earlier the marriage age for men and women is 26 and 22 respectively. Now that has been changed to 27 for men and 26 for women. People started following cohabitation before marriage. Also, 60% of those who married in early 2000s had lived with their future spouse for two years before getting married.
EHarmony followed the concept of filling personal information and questions for selecting the right partner to their customers. The problem is that they need to fill 436 questions including basic information; it takes around 1.5 to hours. Customer feels too lengthy for filling that information but later it was reduced to 250 questions which take only 45 minutes. Also company faced issues of getting only 20% of potential customers.
After filling all the questions, the company’s next step is matching algorithm. It means they will match the information given and they will find a selection. Also they did a matching algorithm validation scale on 4000 couples. Although critics believed that patent amounted to little more than a marketing gimmick, further company research revealed that successful couples who had met on eharmony were significantly happier than couples who had met “in the wild”.
EHarmony spend a lot of money in marketing activities as $80 million per year. Though they spend huge amount, their advertisement were broadcasted only national cable networks.
The competitor for eHarmony is Yahoo! Personals and Match. In contrast to the tough competitor, people hesitate to give their personal information in heterosexual sites. Mostly men started giving their information than women. Also eHarmony has direct competitors like Interactive corp., Home shopping network, reserve America and Ask. Kindly refer to exhibit 1 for the positioning of eHarmony with competitors. Now Waldorf suggested some options to improve their business with long term relationship segment of the market. First he suggested stopping the diminishing customers by reducing barriers and encouraging the use of fast track communications. Second option is that broadening the customer base to include more casual daters. The third one is growing a new business based on e harmony’s own research and development research. And the final option is geographical expansion of the company. They tried to implement the match making concept in European countries where online date was already popular.
