Kitesurfing: emotions needed

Kiteboarding brand F.One has recently launched a new website to promote its Bandit kites. The site takes the users throughout the exploration of a virtual city where different shops offer different kind of information: the cinema shows a short movie featuring the F.One team, a garage is the place to find out about “safe” kitesurfing and the lab is the place to go to discover F.One innovation.

At first sight I said, wow, very nice work, but after browsing around for a bit I realized the whole things wasn’t as good as it could have been.

Everything is very well designed but, in my opinion, it results too flat and not enough emotional (despite the good amount of video content available). Also, my concern in watching a website like this is on the extended brand experience. I’m definitely not an action sport person, but I feel that consumers might expect more from a brand like F.One. I mean, they might expect interactivity, dialogue (social media!) instead of just browsing through a beautiful yet “shopping window” like website.

Last but not least someone has to explain me the connection between an urban environment like the one in which the site is set and the kitesurfing world.