eHarmony believes in making its marketing as authentic as possible, which means using real-life couples in its television campaigns.

Greg Waldorf: I was the company’s founding investor and really believed greatly in what Neil and Greg were working on [by trying] to bring technology to human relationships. It’s an exciting concept. Nobody had ever tried to tackle this long-term relationship side of the business, and they had an approach and idea for how to do that. And that turned out to be quite successful. About three years ago, I became the CEO and I think there were several things that helped prepare me for this role. First was having a high level of appreciation for how important it was when Neil originally had the vision for eHarmony, which came from that clinical experience. It’s important to actually care a lot and have a clear vision for helping people. So, I kind of inherited that because I was around from the beginning. I think the second part is an enormous appreciation for how eHarmony’s marketing brings a vast amount of people to our business with a high level of authenticity that is very difficult for others to duplicate. And probably the last part is a belief in the quality of the people we actually have here at eHarmony, which makes an incredible difference in the outcomes we have as a business.

ER: Did you make significant changes to the way the company was run or in its marketing efforts?

Waldorf: I think of the changes that we’ve made as more extensions than wholesale changes. For example, when I became CEO, we were basically a U.S.-only company and now we have a very good business up in Canada. We’re in Australia, the United Kingdom and looking at more global expansion. Similarly, we’re looking at ways to engage with people around these “key life decisions,” as we call them. So, we have some websites that are oriented for parents. We have websites for brides who are getting married. Those are extensions of this brand space.

ER: What modifications have you made to your compatibility test over the years?

Waldorf: We’re constantly engaged in the process of making that matching system as good as it can be. Part of the way that we evaluate ourselves is to look at the long-term satisfaction of the people who are getting married. So, if you think about our business, the statistics that I’m probably most proud of, among all others, is how many people get married through eHarmony. And, if you look at Harris Interactive Research, 236 people on an average day in America are married through eHarmony. And, that’s more than 2 percent of marriages in the United States. We really want to know over time if those people are doing better than average. We also want to know if they just have an average marriage, which doesn’t mean that they’re all perfect–but they should be happier.

ER: As a leading online dating site, what makes your company stand out from the competition?

Waldorf: I think it is this intense focus on the customer, and I’m very proud to say that I don’t believe that eHarmony is a cynical company. I think a lot of companies could be in the business that we’re in and have a somewhat cynical attitude toward the customers. What we do is really hard. And everything that we’re trying to do comes from a genuine, authentic desire to help customers to be successful on our site. Nothing makes us happier than losing a customer because they were successful.

ER: How has your DRTV strategy changed over the years?

Waldorf: It’s changed a lot. What’s the same? To this very day, we’ve maintained a high level of authenticity. And to me, that’s an important [aspect of our marketing] that we’ve learned not to stray from. Even though our ads may look different and the pacing might be different, hopefully, we’re really breaking through to people with a campaign that always feels branded, special and unique. So, that hasn’t changed. I think what has changed is we’re much more sophisticated in the way that we think about our marketing mix, the messaging that we’re trying to convey, and helping the people who might still have a barrier to using eHarmony to get over that [hurdle]. Today, we have a very large investment in our response and media attributions methodology.

ER: eHarmony can be considered the early adopter of social networking. Today, people are very active on MySpace and Facebook. Does this help or hurt your business?

Waldorf: So far, it’s not hurt us. I think people who want serious and long-term relationships see value in eHarmony’s matchmaking service. At the same time, I think we have to be prepared for a whole generation of users to graduate from social networking into serious relationship seeking online. And that means always adapting our product and hopefully doing a better job to be ready for that transition. So, the short answer is: we’re not seeing any negative impact, but I think there’s a long-term imperative in realizing that people are very comfortable with the social interaction online.

ER: How has eHarmony evolved with the changing technology?

Harris Interactive Research shows that on average, 236 couples marry every day as a result of being matched on the online dating site.

Waldorf: There are two elements to our business. One is what the consumer sees and actually uses on our site. And the second part is finding the good matches to deliver to the consumers. In terms of the first part, we have introduced features like Secure Call, which allows the user to maintain their privacy one step further in the consideration process. It used to be that as long as you were on our own site, you didn’t have to give out your e-mail address and you were effectively anonymous. But as soon as you wanted to have a phone call–which is a real next step for many people–you then would have to reveal your phone number. Now with Secure Call, it’s almost like a conference call where you both dial in without having to exchange your own phone numbers. And that’s an example of using technology to really benefit the end user. Then the other side of our business is focused on the sheer computational complexity of figuring out these matches. We have been on the cutting edge of a lot of technologies to keep our system growing and scaling. It’s not easy when you are a hundred times bigger than you were seven years ago. You just can’t use the same technology systems; you have to have totally new approaches.

ER: What other forms of marketing does eHarmony do?

Waldorf: We’ve grown all of our online marketing dramatically since 2003. We’ve spent a lot on search marketing. And then we also have programs around e-mail marketing that have been very effective for us over these last few years. So, we have a full assault on the different online channels, which is really diversified into many different kinds of media.

ER: What is eHarmony doing to weather these tough economic times?

Waldorf: People come to us for great long-term relationships. And what we know is that people have no trouble ascertaining the value if they understand what it is we’re doing for them. That means just making the service better and really communicating the value proposition as crisply as we can. I also think that in all economies, the desire to be in a great long-term relationship doesn’t change. If anything, during hard times, people may value it even a little more.