Engagement season not actually a season

Alright, Kay Jewelers. We’re fighting.

Here I am, wrapped in blankets on a chilly Sunday afternoon enjoying the unholy beatdown the Seahawks are dealing Minnesota, when a commercial plays — and plays, and plays and plays again. It must have aired a dozen times over the course of one football game. It was a Kay Jewelers advertisement, claiming we’re all currently in the middle of what they term “engagement season.”

Engagement season? Who gave Kay Jewelers the right to just up and declare us all a part of its so-called engagement season? Since when was fabricating an entire season an acceptable marketing strategy?

It can really only be so many seasons at once, and this particular time of year is already packed full of seasons that actually exist. It’s the holiday season, football season and pie season all rolled into one glorious winter season. So way to pick the busiest season of all to push your agenda on everyone already broke from Christmas shopping.

But perhaps more egregiously, Kay didn’t even bother specifying when exactly engagement season started — or when it ends. How simple it would’ve been to say “December is engagement season,” but nope. The higher-ups wouldn’t want to limit such a lucrative ad campaign to one month out of the year, would they?

That’s some twisted logic, Kay Jewelers. Breast Cancer awareness seems content with just the month of October, but I guess you think engagement season is much more important. From what I can tell, your advertisement is suggesting engagement season spans the entire holiday season before rolling right through January and into Valentine’s Day — which I’m still not entirely convinced isn’t just another thing you made up to boost sales.

So when does it end? Springtime? You can’t fool me Kay Jewelers. If winter is engagement season, the transition between spring and summer is almost certainly wedding season. I don’t know how you conned us all into agreeing a wedding ring and an engagement ring needed to be two different rings, but bravo — you’re literally the worst. Now engagement season spans half the calendar year.

Nevermind your entire business is founded on the principle of guilting people into assigning their love a monetary value. Nevermind the fact that diamonds aren’t actually all that rare, and lab-grown gemstones have been around longer than The Rolling Stones. Nevermind your marketing campaign unintentionally suggests there is an opposite, dis-engagement season at some point during the year.

While all valid reasons to harbor animosity toward your ill-thought-out ad campaign, your sorry excuse for a market research team is what really irks me. It costs a ridiculous amount to advertise during a daytime NFL football game, and you bought like 12 spots over three hours. Why?

Look, I’m as annoyed by sports fan stereotypes as anyone, but there’s a reason football commercials lean more toward trucks and beer and less toward jewelry stores. It’s true, sports fans were utterly fooled by Rocktober back in 2007, but we’ve since learned not to put a lot of faith in clever marketing, specifically when it comes to fabricated seasons.

If you’re trying to get an entire demographic to lap up this so-called engagement season, you’re looking in all the wrong places.

— Logan Jones is a junior majoring in journalism, because “being a hater” is not a major currently offered at Utah State. Contact him at Logantjones@aggiemail.usu.edu or on Twitter @Logantj.