Think of all the online dating that happens nowadays. Romantic relationships are one of the fundamental, longstanding components of the human expedience, so it’s shocking to think about how many relationships are now created through a decade-old phenomenon. Twenty years ago, there was an intense stigma about meeting people through websites and revealing you had done so. This was a challenge pioneering online dating site eharmony needed to overcome when it launched 18 years ago. Current CEO Grant Langston recalls couples matched through the site would confess to him, “Our lie is we met in a supermarket, or in Paris.”
A lot has changed since those days, which has challenged eharmony in other ways. People are much more open to the concept of meeting people online, but the competition has never been more fierce. Additionally, Langston notes that research supports the theory that the motivation for some online meetings is purely temporary and transactional. In other words, some people are looking for a good time, not a long time.
“A lot of the ways that we meet people online are like sugary cereal. It gives you an adrenaline rush,” Langston says.
This realization is one of many ways the site has to adapt to meets the needs of the evolving dating marketplace. Langston started his career at eharmony in 2000 as a copywriter. Five years ago he transitioned to a vice president, and was promoted two years ago when they board appointed him CEO.
In that time, marriage has decreased as an institution in the US. The volume of marriage has gone down, even as the overall number of relationships remains unchanged.
“We’ve come to believe that human beings are hard-wired for meaningful relationships,” Langston says.
So eharmony needed to turn the content faucet in a direction other than promoting marriage as an end game. It also needed to update its tech specs and user experience. In Langston’s words, eharmony was frozen in time, a throwback to the early days of the internet.
Facing an uncertain future, Langston guided the company by hanging tight to a few solid principles.
- You can’t break user trust. To this day, eharmony is the most trusted dating site.
- You can’t break the business model either. This thing has to make money.
The first update concerned the input collection needed to match users. When eharmony launched, users were asked 450 questions about their habits and preferences in an effort to connect them with like-minded individuals. Later came a programming breakthrough that achieved better compatibility with just 150 questions. Last year, eharmony was able to scrap the questionarre down to a mere 50.
Users went ballistic. True, they finished the survey at a much higher rate, but they also subscribed to the site at a much lower rate. It was then Langston learned that eharmony users come for the deep experience.
The solution was to revert to the longer questionnaire, but also allow users to rank questions, so the profile-building software can determine what is truly important to users, and where compromises might be able to occur between two overall strongly matched candidates.
The survey updates were followed by a new dashboard and messaging system. In Langston’s words, the old way of messaging someone of the site was through a five-step system of prompts that was completely divorced from the way people communicate online in 2018.
“Everyone knew what it needed to be. It needed to be like a text,” Langston says.
However, changing the way people spoke on eharmony angered some of its older users.
“People that are younger than 40 love this new messaging system. People older than 40 demanded their money back,” Langston says.
What upset the old users is that the old system offered a way of creating conversations that no longer existing on the new system. Older users, particularly those who were recently single after long being partnered complained that they had relied on messaging to know how to talk to potential matches. With just texts, they were lost and didn’t know what to say.
The site responded by offering users a bank of conversation starters they can use to engage in a text talk with their matches. One of Langston’s favorites is: do you prefer money, fame, respect or power?
Only once the interior was reinvented did the company look at refreshing the logo and other external communications. Langston’s team opted to swap the capital “H” with a lowercase version. But they kept the “e” prefix, even though it was antiquated, to show that the company was not a 2018 startup, but a well-established player.
The new brand needed new marketing. “Eighty percent of our budget went to TV. Eighty percent of subscribers came from TV,” Langston says. “In case you haven’t heard, TV isn’t doing so well.”
The company moved to replace the TV-first, TV-only strategy with a blend of TV, social and radio.
“If TV’s the showhorse, and content and social media are the workhorses, then radio is the darkhorse,” Langston says.
