Love for Sale: What Marketers Can Learn From Online Dating

man meets woman and they fall in love, but this house is haunted and the crowd gets rough. Those looking for love online may be lacking in fancy marketing degrees -- do those things even actually matter anymore? -- and, more than likely, a healthy sense of reality. But give them due props for going about the business of selling with a similar acumen to most seasoned marketers. We can all learn a thing or two from the brave and the crazy, riding down, down into that cyber tunnel of love, for roughly $18 a month, or about $3 a whack job. Consider, for a moment, how it works and doesn't work on sites such as Match.com, Craigslist and eHarmony. This is "relationship marketing" -- selling at its most basic. Call it communications 101, or the new skin trade, if you will. Here are several incredibly valuable lessons from online dating, for your sick, voyeuristic perusal. We can besiege people, be they potential lovers or consumers, with all manner of facts and figures. But it is the little things, the delivery, timing, chemistry and damn luck, that make all the difference. Forget metrics and science and whatever else they teach in business school. While the tools of communication change, the truth will always come down to this: We are just people trying to connect with other people in the same way we always have, whether we're selling love or linen sheets. It's just that simple and just that complicated. Having done both and having had only middling success with either, I'll take marketing any day. In the ad world, I know I'll never get stuck having to pick up the tab after a night spent with a lousy focus group.

Love for Sale: What Marketers Can Learn From Online Dating

Featured Stories