to me like an unwise campaign for a mother and baby product retailer is to send a bunch of random people cards congratulating them on their pregnancies without confirming the recipients are indeed pregnant. It seems even more unwise for said company to pose as a fake friend sending these people—who, again, may or may not actually be pregnant—a bunch of baby-related gift cards that aren’t really gift cards at all.
Not everyone who buys a baby gift or product has or will have a baby, or want a baby, or, more importantly, want a fake stranger to send them a fake baby card. And so, per theHalen Hall-Chisler’s letter was sent to her parents’ house in Marietta, Ohio. Last year Ms. Hall-Chisler, who is 26, had an abortion. That caused a rift in her relationship with her mother.
Receiving the congratulatory package made her feel uncomfortable. “It was a little scary,” said Ms. Hall-Chisler, who works in a doughnut shop in Portland, Maine. “Especially in my circumstance, it was addressed to me with a name I don’t normally go by and not a lot of people know that is my first name.”Claire Jiang, 24, said she had received a frantic text from her father asking if she was pregnant. Embarrassed, Ms. Jiang, who is an architect in New York, emphatically denied the accusation.
But she was nonetheless confused as to why she would have been on the mailing list. The only explanation, she thought, was that she had purchased a baby gift for a friend last year. But even then, she was not living at her parents’ address at the time. Not nearly ready to start a family, Ms. Jiang was perplexed that she was the target demographic. Her first reaction was to say to her father: “Can you just throw them away? I don’t want to think about this.”Indeed, this particular marketing technique is creepy and invasive at best, and harmful at worst.