Not Your Regular Cat's Cradle

It’s all the things I just don’t have in my life right now: an iPad or Android tablet and a cat.  

But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have marketing significance – even if I can only appreciate from afar the “You vs. Cats” game recently introduced by Friskies® cat food.

Coming off the vitality of showing cats doing amazing and silly things on YouTube, a recent set of video games presented on the website for this company allows you and your cat to test the dexterity of the paw with bright shapes and colors that move across the tablet screen.  

The reason these are not silly gimmicks, but marketing savvy is because when a website promotes its brands by integrating product information with direct selling, nutritional details and unique site aspects – including games – you have a captured and enraptured audience that will stay at the site longer and they are apt to have stronger recognition when it comes to the brand.

It’s not just the minutes they stay with this unique promotional message. It’s especially potent, as an alternative media when it mentions the product in the game (Tasty Treasure Hunt is a line of canned cat food) or even HAS the product as part of the game (See Party Mix Up – moving objects that are shaped like the cat treats of same name.)

When developing my master’s degree capstone paper I suggested that these elements gave websites the brand positioning strength that was previously relegated to traditional broadcast and print advertising. But we now know that branding can come from anywhere. And when you consider the 86.4 million pet cats in the US, you have a recipe for associating Friskies with everything that is fun with cat ownership.

In fact, as of 5/10 at 8:40 PM – the cats had it all over the humans in the You vs. Cats challenge:  4, 728, 820 points for the humans vs. 5,489,110 points for the cats.  And the real time, worldwide leader board just kept on ticking.