Young But Not Stupid

It Used to be easy in 1992. When Robert Wolfe wanted to attract customers to the first Moosejaw Mountaineering outdoor store in Keego Harbor, MI, he and his co-founders came up with a simple plan.

“We had the employees go outside and start playing ball in the parking lot,” says Wolfe, then 22. “That drew a crowd.”

Fifteen years later, Moosejaw is still drawing crowds, Wolfe is CEO of a chain of six stores in Michigan and Chicago, and sales are increasing by 50% to 70% every year. And while the bats and balls have been put away in favor of more organized promotional tactics, the company still tries to slant its marketing efforts to convey the notion that twenty-somethings are running the store.

For example, last fall the company ran an e-mail promotion around Marmot foul-weather gear: Customers who bought $200 worth of Marmot apparel got a free Marmot Precip rain jacket, a $100 value. “At the same time, we put a little tag on the e-mail that said, ‘All the kids are dressing up as a Precip for Halloween this year’,” Wolfe says.

“We have the great product, but then we put some stupid little twist to it that makes us stand out from everybody else.” That promotion hiked sales of Marmot gear by more than 300%, he says.

In Moosejaw’s “Operation Sale” last October, customers were invited to play the old electronic board game at checkout. If they managed to pick up the charley horse without setting off the buzzer, they got 20% off one item; a successful wishbone extraction earned 15% off; and any other part of the “funatomy” was rewarded with a 10% discount.

Wolfe says the chain’s freewheeling approach to marketing itself evolved because the founders were too young to know better.

“When I was 21 and opening that first store, I genuinely didn’t know it was unusual to toss a football to customers as they walked in the door,” he says. “We valued connecting with the customer on a level that was not just about the product, and that’s how we’ve kept it. Everything we put out there has to reflect that we want to sell the best products in the world and have as much fun as we can doing it.”

Moosejaw’s marketing combines two components, says Wolfe: the lowest prices possible in a retail segment that often sells at list price, and a sense of fun. The Marmot sales promotion, for example, was a conscious effort to get away from the typical “free gift with purchase” campaigns of the outdoor-gear industry.

“You buy $500 worth of gear, and what do you get? A free hat or water bottle,” Wolfe says. “We told Marmot, ‘Instead of giving us 1,000 water bottles at $10 a pop, give us 100 free Precip jackets to make a more meaningful promotion.’ Someone who gets a free $100 jacket is going to tell 10 people about it, but someone getting a free water bottle isn’t telling anyone.”

The approach is mirrored on Moosejaw’s main e-commerce site, www.moosejawlowdown.com. Besides offering frequent shopping contests to get visitors coming back, a special “Madness” section of the site offers a dozen different quirky ways to interact with the brand, including dating tips, a term paper clinic, a podcast from the Moosejaw cleaning crew and a popular feature called “Rock, Paper, Scissors.”

That last game actually originated on customers’ mobile phones, shortly after Moosejaw began asking them to sign up for text messages and coupons. The promotion went out to customers signed up for Moosejaw’s loyalty program and read: “Text me back with Rock, Paper or Scissors. I already know what I’m throwing, and if you beat me, I’ll add 100 Moosejaw points to your account.”

That text push got a 66% response rate and has now been institutionalized on the Web site, where customers can e-mail their choice of rock, paper or scissors. A correct guess for the day wins them a coupon for 20% off a Moosejaw hoodie, T-shirt or hat.

At about the same time, the chain took a full-immersion plunge into mobile commerce with a mobile Web site that lets customers access and buy from its 40,000-item product line over their Web-enabled cell phones. “Getting our Web site onto phones and doing text messaging are really important to us,” says Wolfe. “Our customers live on their phones, so we want to be there.”

Still, it’s the message, not the medium that makes Moosejaw stand out. Last spring the company sent out an online coupon for a free “invisible cup” with every purchase of a pair of board shorts or a bathing suit. Customer reviews were uniformly favorable: “Best invisible cup I’ve ever owned!” “I lost mine the first day. I hope they will send me another.”

“We definitely have a better relationship with the college-age demographic because this kind of fun marketing resonates with them,” Wolfe says. “They get our message the most.”

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