The Dog Marketing Blog

This weekend I’ve decided to update my personal website, dog website and this blog. I thought I’d set up some Google Alerts to help me find content. Of course it’s always wise to start with a search to make sure one’s Alert pulls up the right sort of content, so I started with the obvious search term – Dog Marketing.

I was amazed by the number of marketing companies which include “Dog” in their name. The list started with Two Dog Marketing, followed by One Dog Marketing and included Brown, Black, and Red Dog Marketing, Mad Dog, Alpha Dog, and Lead dogs.  Top Dog, Mountain Dog, and even Media Dog made it onto the top two results pages. I might add that only one of these companies, the highest ranking of several Black Dog sites, had anything to do with actual canines.

Bottom line, these terms aren’t going to yield what I’m looking for as blog fodder, but they illustrate the power of the dog as metaphor. Loyal, trustworthy, always there for you, your best friend; who wouldn’t want a dog for a business partner?

I’m taking advantage of an unexpected break in employment to get back to posting. Yeah! (for the posting opportunity, not the renewed task of job-seeking)

This summer Retailwire published a series of pet department retailing tips from Nestle Purina. I’ll start with the one talking about allocation of space within the pet department.  They recommended a 60/40 dog/cat split, which at first I found surprising, as I’d always heard there were more pet cats than dogs in the US. Well, upon further research I found this was true, but there are actually more dog-owning HOUSEHOLDS, as cat owning households in general own more cats (2.2) than dog owning households have dogs (1.7) according to a 2007 study by the American Veterinary Medical Association, and there are actually more dog than cat owning households in the U.S. overall (37% vs 32%.) Since dogs are generally bigger, they eat more, play with bigger toys and are generally more tolerant of wearing silly clothes, I can see where the 60/40 rule makes sense.