By Anne Mahoney
If you’ve ever marketed yourself online in the romance department, you likely have painstakingly analyzed every part of your profile. Is the photo attractive? Do I say the right things about myself? How should I word my first email to another enticing product in the dating aisle?
An article in the New York Times looks into how OkCupid, an online dating site, shares user data with its registered love-seekers to provide advice on how to develop and market their personal brands. To find the data, it analyzed 7,000 user profiles, noting photos, number of responses and content of those responses. One useful finding was that being “fascinating” or “cool” is more important than the initial physical attraction factor. For instance, OkCupid says a woman using a photo portraying her playing an instrument or on an exotic beach receives more responses than focusing on physical assets.
If true, this certainly is valuable information for site-users. The study has, however, strictly focused on pure numbers through data mining. To gain additional insights, I sought out the opinion of the foremost expert I know in statistical data analytics: Medill IMC professor Edward Malthouse. Professor Malthouse brought up the scientific question still at large for OkCupid: Why do these tactics work? He thinks marketing can help to explain.
“Some physical beauty is a point of parity,” he said. “Differentiators will make you stand out, at least among a segment that values such activities. So, marketing theory predicts that those who are differentiated will be more successful.”
That is the scientific way to view the findings of OkCupid’s study. It hypothesized that differentiators would increase or decrease response rates, which the study confirmed. Yet there are other variables that have not been taken into account. Malthouse points out an example as the experiences of the customer, or date-seeker browsing through profiles. These experiences are not directly focused on the “product,” or person trying to find a date. If each individual created a first-impression experience for the type of person they are trying to attract – the “targeted consumer” – Malthouse theorizes it would have an even stronger effect.
Boiling down an intimate subject with numerous and oftentimes-mysterious factors, such as dating, into pure numbers surely has its challenges. Do you think there’s truth to the OkCupid study? How can marketers benefit from activating these types of analytical tactics?
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Anne Mahoney is the Social Media Director at Vitamin IMC and a student in the Masters in Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University's Medill School. She can be reached at annemahoney2010@u.northwestern.edu
