Skechers paid $40M for ads that toned the marketing, not the muscles

Skechers' Shape-ups were 'toning shoes' sold on the promise that simply walking in them would help you lose weight and strengthen and tone your buttocks, legs and abdominal muscles. The ads told consumers to 'Shape Up While You Walk' and 'Get in Shape without Setting Foot in a Gym.' The same claims ran across the Resistance Runner, Toners and Tone-ups lines.

The claims rested on what Skechers called an independent clinical study by a chiropractor, Dr. Steven Gautreau. The FTC found the study did not produce the results advertised, that Skechers had paid Gautreau to conduct it, and that he was married to a Skechers marketing executive — a fact the ads never disclosed. For the Resistance Runner, Skechers claimed up to 85 percent more 'muscle activation' than regular running shoes; the FTC said the company had cherry-picked the results.

On 16 May 2012 Skechers agreed to pay $40 million to settle the FTC's deceptive-advertising charges, with the money going to refunds for buyers — a larger sum than the $25 million Reebok had paid for similar toning-shoe claims. Celebrities including Brooke Burke and Kim Kardashian had fronted the campaign.

The shoes did not do what the ads said. The error was not optimism but false precision: specific percentages, a named expert, clinical language, all of it manufactured. The more scientific the claim sounded, the more damage it did once the FTC pulled it apart.