The Dog Marketing Blog

I’ll admit being a sucker for marketing featuring photos of Bull Terriers! I found  Fetching Tags through their social media outreach on Twitter. The company sells premium custom dog tags, made of brushed aluminum. While lacking a bit in the amount of information they contain compared to other, more practical tags like those from Boomerang Pet Tags , Fetching tags offers tags of a whimsical, decorative nature that can be personalized with a pet’s name and owner’s phone number.  A premium product that allows dog owners to show their pet’s personality while also providing a practical reason to justify the purchase.

An alert on the Eurodogtraining blog led me to news of a new product announcement from Mattel: Puppy Tweets, a device that allows your dog to send tweets via a collar tag.  The tag responds to noise and motion and sends one of several tweets in response to your dog’s activity (or lack thereof.)   Details on how the device works were a little sparse, apparently the collar device sends data on sound and motion to a USB sensor mounted on your computer, and you leave your dog’s Twitter account signed in while you’re out.  I find it similar in concept to the  sensor-based TweetingBar account which reports on the beer keg’s status in the New York office of digital agency 360i.

Puppy Tweets allows your dog will join a number of other tweeting canines, most of whom have more than a few canned responses to share.  The only practical use I can see is to check on a dog with barking issues when left alone.  I don’t as a rule follow dog accounts that only tweet items of interest to dogs  and I don’t plan on signing up any of my canines when this product launches in the fall.  For $29.95 it might be an amusing novelty to some, but for I can’t see it catching on with anyone who is serious about either dogs or Twitter.

The Humane Society of the United States has entered the pet food  business with the launch of Humane Choice, a vegetarian dog food made from United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) organic-certified ingredients. Manufactured in Uruguay,  this product is  sold through select PETCO and Whole Foods stores.  A kibble which meets the American Association of Feed Control Officers (AAFCO) standards for adult maintenance is the only product available. Humane Choice’s marketing arm is the G&B Marketing company, which sends 6% of the wholesale price of each bag to the HSUS.

While I can only speculate about the motives behind the launch of this product, it seems more about providing a feeding option for people sympathetic toward the HSUS’s stand against domestic animals than the nutritional needs of dogs.   The group actively opposes farming of animals and the feedstuffs fed to meat animals; they feel animals are equal in status to humans and should not be owned or consumed.  HSUS opposes breeding and working with dogs,  which may be the reason no growth or performance formulas are offered,  I suspect it’s also hard to meet those standards without using animal protein.

A veterinary study reported on dogchannel.com found that dog foods labelled low-calorie had inconsistent labeling and feeding recommendations.  Content analysis showed that the food in the container  did not always match package claims.

Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University did an analysis of  44 different dog foods with labels indicating they would support canine weight loss. Such foods are required by federal law to show calorie counts, but unfortunately not only were these numbers  inaccurate,  the recommended feeding amounts would result in weight gain.

Dog obesity is a significant problem with nearly half of all dogs classified as overweight and nearly 10% obese in a 2008 study. Just as in humans, excess weight contributes to increased health problems, veterinary expenses, and decreased length and quality of life.  A recent study also found a correlation between overweight owners and over weight dogs.

Owners who want their dogs to lose weight need to think of the fundamentals – diet and exercise.  Unfortunately, dog food manufacturers are not always a reliable source of  weight loss advice.