Business News

Executive Summary

The growth of online dating sites has increased rapidly throughout the early 2000s and continues to flourish even as new competitors enter the arena on a daily basis. One company in particular, eHarmony, was launched in August of 2000, initially leveraged the founder’s 35 years of professional counseling and experience to establish legitimacy and create a niche product. Through Dr. Warren’s advice and through a tightly integrated online user interface which encompassed a Personality Profile, which fed into a patented matching algorithm, that finally led to a Guided Communication system, allowed users to be guided to their potential match. The intention with these steps was to remove the issues faced by most singles who have become disillusioned with inferior dating services. Through an aggressive marketing campaign, outreach to faith based groups, and media outlets, eHarmony went from 300,000 registered members in 2002 to 3 million users in 2004.

EHarmony has been criticized and exploited by competitor websites, but they remain committed to offering a unique service at a premium cost. They have been successful in obtaining new customers by touting their reinvestment in R&D and relying on viral methods of product support. They boast astonishing statistics in terms of marriage success rates and claim that 2% marriages in the U.S. were from customer bases. By 2007, over 86,000 marriages were through eHarmony’s service and the rate continues to grow at an exponential rate.

The next few years will be critical for eHarmony to maintain market share as completion from Match.com’s spinoff, Chemistry.com, uses similar strategic characteristics and gears their servies to eHarmony’s clientel and demographics. eHarmony must continue to evolve their business and pursue …..

needs to keep this evolving in order to keep growing and maintaining