“If someone doesn’t think you’re hot, the next best thing for them is to think you’re ugly” and other surprising marketing ideas from online dating statistics
Dating site OKCupid.com gives extensive analysis of social behavior: who’s got more messages, how people respond. What makes it fascinating is that the analysis is always backed by hard data: there is no subjective argument, only pure statistical observations. This is a rare opportunity to glimpse directly at our minds, and mostly as what Daniel’s Kahneman calls ‘System 1’, the part of our brain responsible for intuitive response; the part of our brain always eager to jump to conclusion and save us the effort of reasoning.
My belief is that a lot can be learned from that gigantic amount of data. My belief is that it tells more for elaborating marketing messages than a library of textbooks…
Polarize your message
In ‘The Mathematics of Beauty’ OK Cupid shows that women rated sometimes as ugly and sometimes as beautiful get more messages that the women unanimously rated as attractive. Their game-theoretic hypothesis is that men identify an opportunity in not-for-everyone women, while they tend to walk away from ‘universal cuties’ they think are more courted.
It is natural to look for such opportunities in other fields as well. The more one can understand how your idea may turn off other people, the more they can be attracted to it. Take your flaws and play them up. If you can’t change your overall attractiveness, try to maximize your variance.
Keep it short
Looking at the rate of message response in “Online Dating Advice: Optimum Message Length” shows that women’s reply rate tends to increase with message length, but not enough to compensate for the time it took the men to type them. The most productive message occurs around 200 characters.
Another interesting fact is that when women initiate contact, their optimum message length is even shorter, at only 50 characters. One could think that such asymmetry is due to the supply-demand unbalance between men and women on dating sites, but similar figures appear for same-sex messaging.
If you’re writing to women, keep it short or you’re wasting some time. If you’re writing to men, keep it really, really short.
Don’t write “Hello beautiful”
“Exactly what to say in a first message” dives into the reply rates of half a million first contact messages. As expected, poor grammar and familiar expressions are huge turn-offs. More surprising, physical compliments are also detrimental to the response rate.
I don’t think it’s because people are expecting more profound exchanges (seriously!), but because often heard or ‘standard’ compliments are intuitively perceived as a lack of genuine interest.
Similarly, the use of common greeting terms seems to be a turn-off. It’s better to not use any salutation at all than writing ‘hello’.
Conclusion:
- Don’t ‘Yo’ your prospects. You knew that, already, didn’t you?
- Don’t compliment your prospect on what they know or are told all the times. Make them think about the compliment.
- Be slightly surprising in your greetings.
OKCupid also shows that being an atheist is better for the reply rate, but I can’t figure what it means for marketing…
