Dogside

A weird video came through the email list, talking about the world’s first doggy boy band.

It was for Valentine’s day, about falling in love doggy style. Full of cute dogs and some great products, all of which can be bought on dogside.com, the website for the urban dog. I’ll admit to being slightly bemused by the whole thing. The site is heavy on the flash which seems strange for an e-commerce site, but they also trying to develop a community around the brand, with a forum, a blog and mapping tools for you to share your favourite walks and dog friendly places. At least I guess it’s a map, but it’s not really working here.

Everything looks pretty new and not really gelling yet (the company launched last November). From looking at search results, they have started to kick of a promotional campaign with the video last week, as it gets a number of write-ups in advertising blogs and the products are starting to get mentions. The forum and the blog are still pretty sparse (only one post so far this year), but hopefully that will start to be worked on. Unfortunately the posts at the moment still read like marketing blurb, that’s gone through some approval process. There’s little personality there, no indication of who is actually writing the posts. I’m hoping the control will loosen up a little so more of the company personality comes through.

A final word about using flash for an e-commerce site. Why? It’s not accessible and I can’t deep link if I want to talk to people about the products or share the information. I find it a strange choice that I can see acting against the brand.