Match.com’s phony guarantee
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
At the gym tonight, I saw a Match.com commercial. It promised that if you didn’t find “someone special” through the service in six months, you would get another six months free. At first, it reminded me of when Triple-A let my mom down and they offered her another year free to make up for it. She was like, “what good is that if your service isn’t any good in the first place?” Exactly.
With Match.com, though, it’s even worse, because their cost of providing access to any one client is almost nothing. Triple-A might have to do something for you in that extra year. With Match.com, once you’re in, they are already done, so it’s just a phony guarantee. What Match.com wants is your money, and once they’ve got it, they are holding onto it. They make the same profit whether they let you poke around twice as long or not.
Then I got to thinking about it, and I can kind of see how hard it would be for Match.com to offer any other kind of guarantee. It’s such a vague service. How does Match.com ever know if a user finds someone special, anyway? Because users quit logging in?
If they were to make a real guarantee, one in which they’d give you all or some of your money back if you didn’t find “someone special,” things would get more complicated. They would really want to know that you did not, in fact, find someone, and the definitions of success would get hazy fast.
A Match.com user could call up Customer Service, “Yes, I’d like to get my six month refund. I didn’t find anyone special.”
“Mr. Russell, we have reason to believe that on an outing with another Match.com user, you did, in fact, manage to get yourself laid.”
“Well, yes, I did, but it wasn’t special.”
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