andydidyk.com

I’m an outdoor enthusiast, and I enjoy hiking, backpacking, camping, caving, etc. It’s no secret that I’m as obsessed about having the right gear as I am about the actual activities, so I’m constantly scouring discount outdoor gear stores online in search of the next great thing that I didn’t know I needed. One of those sites is moosejaw.com, a very reputable dealer that has its marketing talons firmly embedded in the 16-30 year-old market, as their website design clearly indicates. I saw a promotion on their site that made very little sense from a product standpoint, but was a brilliant idea from a promotions standpoint:

“WOW!” I thought. What a great hook to get that twenty-something male to part with $60 in dispensable income for some sandals. A real ninja star, just for buying shoes! I can picture the masses of young men who would otherwise never own a ninja star becoming very excited about buying some sandals in order to have one. However, when you click on the promotion…
… you get to see how “real” it really is. It’s a cheap plastic star. As if that wasn’t safe enough, moosejaw thoughtfully included a plastic safety ring as well.

What a crushing disappointment. And worse, how useless! What would you do with such an insignificant trinket? Now I know, there are thousands of good reasons for not sending a real metal star with sharpened points. Thousands of reasons that lawyers with good intentions of protecting their company posed in the conference room where this ninja star promotion was probably dreamed up. But in doing so, moosejaw ends up delivering something to their customers that is worse than nothing – an empty, misleading promise.