Unlikely Promotional Marketing Lessons From Netflix's 'Canine Intervention'

I’ve had a lot of time to watch Netflix over the last few, uh, well, year. I am now the foremost expert in the British Monarchy, and the escapades of the Tiger King feel like they were an eternity ago. Because, in content years, they were.

I’ve since moved on to a show called “Canine Intervention.” It’s about a guy named Jas Leverette who specializes in training dogs that otherwise might have been misunderstood or badly trained, proving that there’s no such thing as a bad dog. Watching happy dogs being trained by the charismatic Leverette was supposed to just be a nice way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon, but it actually turned into a lesson in branding and promotion for small businesses.

Leverette’s business, Cali K9, is at the heart of the show. They film him doing training lessons in his Bay Area headquarters. And, even when he’s traveling to different locations to work on dogs, you’re never too far from the logo.

That’s because he put it on just about everything. He’s usually wearing a T-shirt or jacket with the logo. He regularly wears hats with the logo on it. He drives a van with a vehicle wrap. He even wears a giant gold necklace with the logo on it.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CL4eowyr9bl/

It’s also on wooden blocks he uses to train the dogs to stay put.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CMe4ECgFsAN/

As I was watching the show, it became clear how well Leverette marketed his business just by making his logo top-of-mind at all times. His whole social media presence, even before he landed the show, was much of the same. Most pictures have at least one logo placed somewhere.

And all I could think about, aside from how good the dogs were doing at their new training regimens, was that this is the key to growing a small business. Here is a dog training facility in San Jose, California. The Bay Area is saturated with big-money ventures and tech startups, but a dog training business is the one that lands a Netflix show (which obviously benefits Leverette’s business even more).

The thing is, he’s probably not the only business like that in the Bay, but he’s the one with a show. Most likely, he was the one who put his logo in front of people the most and did the best job of branding, and it got noticed by the right people. Now, anyone looking to train their dog anywhere in Northern California is probably going to go to his site first.

The lesson here, the one I didn’t think I was going to get when I started a show meant to be junk food viewing, was that marketing is about consistency. It’s about consistent and purposeful logo placement. It showed how many things you can put a logo on, and how people will notice it.

Leverette’s marketing acumen is admirable, and the results don’t lie. And while this is the kind of thing promotional products businesses are built on—helping customers establish this sort of branding strategy through merchandise—it's easy to forget that it applies to promo businesses, too.

Market the heck out of yourselves, guys. Get your brand out there! It really does work.

Who would have thought that I would have had two marketing epiphanies from Netflix shows that I thought would just be background noise?