First it was Apple with their Switch campaign. Great vignettes of former PC users who had made the switch over to Mac. Recently, my bank started their own switch campaign, complete with an 800 number for assistance. This got me thinking about the PerfectMatch vs. eHarmony battle underway (By the way, watch for True to join in, they really have to at this point to stay relevant.) I can imagine we will start to see some of the smaller niche sites offer a switch campaign to woo customers away from the large date-warehouses. The marketing copy practically writes itself and the customer feels warm and fuzzy about the attention being paid to them.
At ProfileDoctor we built a system which would take our customers’ Match.com membername and automatically go out to Match and slurp down the profile for our editors to revise. The profile templates for most sites never change, so the structure of the data are pretty solid. At least until sites start using blogs as their profiles. What’s keeping dating sites from doing the same? Obviously there are legal implications, but what if the customer emailed their profile to the competitor? Even a semi- automated switch option would be a cool option for anyone who could save their photos to their hard drive, re-upload them to the new site and paste their essay into a textbox. That’s just about everyone as long as you have a non-geek write the instructions.
This post was written while listening to Keeping The Faith [Just A Touch Mix] from the album “The Works” by De La Soul.
