Engaged in the most current, advanced and relevant marketing tactics, we present you with Marketing News You Can Use, a collection of information that will immediatly impact your business growth. This month's MNYCU focuses on Online Social Networking and how any business, no matter their size and budget, can unlock the power of that technology to grow.
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social-dog.com
Marketing Solutions by Cesson and Lucky’s Card, a discount card for dog owners, have collaborated to create social-dog.com, the newest online social networking site for dogs and their owners. Social-dog.com is a part of Lucky’s Card’s business properties, which will be used to creatively cross-promote one another.
Social-dog.com is unique in that people create profiles for their dogs, not themselves, the most essential component in cross-promoting Lucky’s Card with social-dog.com. Online social networking is a distinctly human form of interaction, and through social-dog.com owners act as their pet’s human surrogate. This relationship further humanizes dogs in their owners’ minds. By connecting members to others who have created profiles — people who presumably share similar values about their pets — the member’s behavior is positively reinforced by this community and hopefully their feelings i for their pets takes on a new dimension . This is very similar to the idea of people thinking of their dogs and cats more as children than animals.
Although people will spend money on their dogs, they really love to spend money to make their children happy. Herein lies social-dog.com’s value for Lucky’s Card, for if a dog is no longer considered a pet but a child, then it is immeasurably more gratifying for dog owners to spend money on their dogs. If they can also save money and still collect the same level of satisfaction with purchases for their dog, then Lucky’s Card and social-dog.com have, by working in concert, added social and economic value to the marketplace by making consumers happy.
The Lucky’s Card/social-dog.com experience highlights an interesting feature of how the economy has changed. Before, businesses and industries had to research the marketplace to determine how to reach interested parties. Now, business is tasked with figuring out where to reach these people. The stimulant behind online social networking’s growth is the people who gather themselves into groups based on a passion for some topic that speaks to them. As a result, online social networking groups may be harnessed as a commercial tool for gathering people into pools of consumers. Further, since the members of these groups have chosen membership, overcoming the initial skepticism of a sales pitch may be neutralized, and the requisite selling may be streamlined based on the intensity of their commitment to their pets.
