Yesterday I saw two friends join the fan page of one of Blinkness' competitors.

Minutes later, I get another two emails inviting me to the fan page.

Always up to collect some intelligence, I decided to click around. To my surprise, I see WAYYYYY more fans than I would expect. Now I'm really intrigued by my competitor.

After spending ~5minutes(!) signing up, I finally ended up on the money screen: invite your facebook friends to recieve a free tshirt. Ah! Very smart. This is how they have amassed their fans: by giving away tshirts. It seems as if the marketing has worked going by the fan page numbers.

But then I went to their facebook app and DAMN: it had fewer than 1% active users for their app.

Great marketing(getting so many fans) with bad ends(not getting people to use your product) equals wasting a buncha money.

There's a thing about college students: they will take trash if it's FREE. It doens't mean they'll consume the trash upon finding out. 

Let's keep going further and do some number crunching. Let's say these guys got these tshirts printed for the absolute bottom price of a dollar a piece. Couple bucks for shipping comes out to $3.00 per delivered tshirt. How can you test if this is a good investment?

For one, you acknowledge that you don't know. I don't know if it is a good or bad investment. Then you design the experiment...

Independant Variable: Two campuses with 500 tshirts each distributed, one campus with no kinda marketing
Dependant Variable: Sales on three sample campuses over a defined time period

You get a 1,000 tshirts. Give out 500 tshirts each on two campuses. Don't do any other marketing on those two campuses. Monitor the sales figures...almost every sales coming in will be a result of the tshirt. And every sale that doesn't come in...will be a result of the ineffectiveness of the tshirt marketing.