Mobile Dating: A Case Study
Zachary Kingston is a 27-year-old trainee antiques dealer and man-about-town, the town being, in this case, Manhattan. With blond hair and soft good looks, it’s hard to imagine Zachary going home alone after a night on the tiles no matter what he did, but the man himself professes to shyness: “I just can’t walk up to a girl in a bar and start talking, like some guys can,” he admits. “Mobile dating gave me a great option for effectively breaking the ice before that first meeting.”
One night in late May Zachary was headed to a downtown bar, Establishment, to meet up with a couple of his buddies. Unfortunately (or fortunately), he got stood up, but not wanting the night to end so early, he decided to stay out and give mobile dating a try. Enter Samantha Morton, a 25-year-old accounts payable clerk for a major international bank, who was out for a quiet cocktail “or three” with one of her girlfriends at a bar in a nearby area.
It was just a few minutes work for Zachary to take out his Blackberry, find Samantha’s profile on a mobile dating service, and send her a message suggesting they meet up for a quick drink.
Now dating for four months, Zachary and Samantha can’t say enough good things about mobile dating:
“I’ve recommended mobile dating to all my friends,” says Samantha, a voluptuous former resident of Kingston, South Africa. “They all know it’s how I met Zachary – these days, it’s not such a big deal to meet someone using a dating service, like it used to be.”
With mobile dating set to grow year-on-year by big numbers, industry experts agree that it’s the next big trend in the dating technology marketplace.
“Mobile dating is the big buzz story of dating service technology in the late 2000s,” says Emmanuel Mellon, an analyst with marketing and creative agency Richardson, Brown and Johnson. “While it couldn’t have existed without internet dating coming along before it and popularizing the general concept, we believe that mobile dating will eventually capture a large percentage of the market share that internet dating currently holds. The future is very, very bright for the early players in this market, who have a great opportunity to establish a big foothold in the hearts and minds of potential users in the 20-to-30-something demographic.”
Whatever the future holds for mobile dating, it’s clear from case studies such as Zachary’s that mobile dating works for some, and for that reason alone it’s here to stay. “I think mobile dating is going to be the way of the future,” Zachary told us. “I know that there are plenty of nice guys out there like me, who struggle with the confidence you need to just start talking to a woman who’s with her friends in a noisy bar or club. Unfortunately, what this means is that the guys who are having all the success with the ladies are the cocky jerks, who end up treating women badly and giving all us guys a bad name,” he opined. “I think mobile dating will help more nice guys get with nice ladies, and I’m all for that!”