The Latest Unethical Advertising from Skechers

Renee Kovalcheck

RK363206@ohio.edu

One of the top selling athletic shoes in the country is trying to market to a younger market. Skechers is touting its Shape-Up sneaker to the tween market by showing animated commercials featuring petite girls on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network plus Yahoo.

The message from Skechers is that young girls need to get fit and tone their behinds and legs to be popular and fit.

According to http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/05/14/skechers-shape-ups-for-tween-girls/

“Though Skechers apparently claims to be targeting childhood obesity, at least two independent studies found that these types of shoes have no benefit in terms of fitness, whether measured by calories burned or level of muscle toning. But as Morning Gloria at Jezebel points out, girls are never too young to be socialized into buying products of questionable effectiveness — and avoiding food — in the hopes of “looking good and having fun,” as the ad put it.”

How out of line and unethical has Skechers become in marketing to the tween audience who should not even be remotely concerned on hoping to tone and firm their butts?

Body image, anorexia, bulimia and just plain growing up too fast are challenges all moms and dads try to deal with in raising their young daughters on a positive note. Now we have Skechers telling them to worry about wearing the right sneakers to tone their behinds?

This is not the right audience for Skechers to be marketing too and it makes it even more questionable in that the shoes in a variety of studies have no real value in toning at all.

According to Ken Thompson, Independent Fitness Coach, http://wyildcardfitness.com/do-skechers-shape-ups-really-work/ “I would go so far as to call the Skechers Shape Ups a gimmick, and I say their advertising is totally misleading and preys off our inherent desire to find the easy way out.”

On so many levels, Skechers is marketing a product which really doesn’t do what it says it will and trying to get little girls, who shouldn’t even be worried about toning to buy the shoes. Skechers brings out many of the examples sited in the article from http://www.aef.com/on_campus/classroom/speaker.