Bad ads -- applied social psychology

[songofapollo]

You've all seen the television ads for Chemistry.com that feature singles that eHarmony has rejected.

I've long thought that Chemistry.com is shooting itself in the foot with its ads, by conveying that eHarmony is selective (and probably for normal or cool people), whereas Chemistry.com is taking all the rejects. This is straight social psychology

Comments

[boffo]

Back when I was single, I really liked OKCupid except for one huge flaw: It was free. I would have greatly preferred a pay site, as it would have filtered out all the people who weren't taking it seriously. If meeting a potential partner isn't worth $20 to someone, I probably don't want to be dating her.

However, at least OKCupid was honest. A lot of other dating sites have this obnoxious scam where they invite people to create free profiles, and they leave up profiles of former members who let their membership lapse. Then when a paid member sends them a message, the site will send them an e-mail saying, "You just got a message. To read it, pay $X to join the site."

This is fair to the provisional users. However, since they don't clearly label the provisional profiles, it's incredibly sleazy verging on outright fraud toward their paid users. The site tricks the paid user into thinking there are a lot more members than there really are, and tricks them into wasting their time and hopes writing to people who are never even going to read their message.