We Can Learn a Lot from Purina

Are you dogcentric or catcentric?  Purina wants to know.

Purina’s Petcentric is an online community segmented for both dog lovers and cat lovers.  Other than a rather lengthy form to fill out to join the online community, Purina hits the d-spot (or c-spot for that matter).

What do they do well that we can learn from as marketers:

1. Dog and cat lovers always want to hear about other dogs and cats (probably like your customers as well). Purina combines pet articles with photos, video, and podcasts to give owners a complete taste of what other community members are up to.
2. Articles are light, personal and helpful, perfect for the tone of the site. The only criticism here would be the number of articles.  It looks like they average about three to four articles per month.  I’d like to see a few more.
3. What Petcentric lacks in article content, they make up for in user-generated content (UGC). From what I can tell, the dogcentric site has over 5,000 photos uploaded to the site, with usually well over 100 views on each photo.  While it’s no YouTube, it’s not bad for a corporate community.
4. Once a member, uploading photos and videos, and commenting on articles and other content, seems pretty easy – a must for a corporate community site.

While there is a tad too much corporate selling going on by Purina, the selling is always relevant, and probably wanted by the community (sales on dog food, relevant cat trinkets). But the key to a site like this working for Purina is
a) transparency and
b) they don’t get in the way (they let the user-interaction just happen. Trust is big.) Overall, this is an excellent example of a company getting to know their customers inside and out…as well as giving them a voice. It begs the question: If you get a dog or cat lover involved in a site like this, how likely are they to stay loyal to Purina.  Odds are, pretty likely.