Thanks to Susan Panian at American Town Network (now the largest online community network in the U.S.) for telling me about how Palladium shoes is taking an innovative approach to selling shoes by tapping in to Geocaching. Geocaching is on my short list of next big things, and I have promised to write a non-trivial story about it. (In the meantime, there are some related things about geocaching in the hiking section of the blog). While most people think of geocaching as a sport using GPS receivers and geocaching.com to find hidden “caches” around the world, Palladium thinks of it as a way to peddle its men’s and women’s travel shoes.
Each page of the Palladium web site has a link to pages that provide a tutorial about geocaching. The pages display each of nine shoe styles in a “home city” and provide travel information and cache clues for that city. Palladium is placing clues on non-Palladium sites and clues will be hidden in different retailer-determined locations and announced on public geocaching sites. Posters will go up in the cities where the hidden caches are placed. The target market is “Urban Nomads” ages 22 to 38. The tag line for their advertising campaign is “The Destination is the Journey".Palladium has has taken an innovative approach to “advertising” packaged with valuable information in a non-intrusive way. Ironically, there shoes are nice looking but don’t seem up to the challenges of any serious hiking. Maybe I would find them more appealing if I was 22-38 instead of 22+38!

• Other patrickWeb stories about geocaching