A Product of Marketing

i feel so ashamed. i bought something based on an advertisement.

i went to REI this past weekend — never a good thing. I didn’t need anything! But I had some time to kill before meeting someone near by and figured I’d walk through the store. “Just browsing,” I promised myself. 30 minutes later and I’m trying on new climbing shoes. “Man, climbing that route on Saturday was really hard. My old La Sportiva shoes just can’t edge like they used to. I bet if I had newer shoes, I could climb better.” Now granted, there weren’t a lot of shoes to choose from. I wanted some new shoes with velcro but didn’t really care about the brand. That already narrowed down the selections to 2 choices: Evolv or Mad Rock. I kind of liked the pure black Evolv’s to the clay-colored Mad Rock’s. And then it hit me: I had seen a poster at the local climbing gym with Chris Sharma. It was an Evolv poster. “Well, if Chris Sharma likes them…”

I immediately realized what I had done. I had made a judgment based on a marketing campaign. But the disgust didn’t last long. I decided that my purchase was a good one: I couldn’t tell any major difference between the two shoes other than color…and furthermore, I felt that my purchase was like shaking the hand of the Evolv marketing team. “Good job guys. You did your job — you got into my head.” So in essence, I was congratulating a job well done.”Excellence should be congratulated,” I thought as I walked to the parking lot; new shoes in tow. Maybe somewhere there’s a marketing team member being patted on the back by marketing karma.