Article Subject: Nice basket, fancy dinner?

Article Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/06/dating-agency-asda-shopping-basket

Website: none

Dr. Dato’s Brief:

I found this article through the Google Dating Alerts I receive in my email inbox almost every day. So far a number of these postings can be passed off as not readable or not having any worthy content. However, some posters are very clever in promoting other dating sites through articles such as this.

Unknown to the reader, this article makes out that Asda, which is a famous supermarket like Safeway here in USA have officially launched a dating site called AsdaDating.com. This struck me as rather interesting and curiosity got the better of me, since my specialty includes researching in the online dating scene. By the way Asda is owned by the meg retailer Wal-Mart.

The subject of the article is interesting as it talks about how someone’s shopping basket can be compared with someone else and a relationship compatibility match can be extracted from this information. It has several people writing in and sharing their notes on this subject. Unfortunately, on further investigation there is no such site called AsdaDating.com and in fact the link takes you to UKDating.com which is a pretty generic dating site in UK.

One will come across marketing techniques such as this to drive traffic to the dating site but I am surprised that a creditable paper such as the Guardian.co.uk did not check it’s own story out for accuracy or maybe they are in the marketing scheme themselves?

Asda Supermarket Dating - Really?