All the feels: How to differentiate your pet food brand
The pet food and treats market is a crowded space with a dizzying array of brands lounging on store shelves or displayed on e-commerce platforms. Pet owners often admit to feeling overwhelmed with choices.
Indeed, according to Samantha Scantlebury, brand strategy director for Signal Theory, a brand development, marketing and design practice, all consumers face a “cognitive strain” where dozens of thoughts, needs and priorities flood their brains, competing for attention and action festivals
How can pet food and treat brands win without increasing the crowd? “It’s time to make advertising human again,” reads the first statement on Signal Theory’s website. During a pet food industry webinar on September 13, 2022, Scantlebury used this topic as a starting point for her segment, where she explained, “Pet Food Branding: How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market”.
Consumers are human beings, i.e. emotional beings
Scantlebury and Signal Theory aren’t the first or the only ones to recommend focusing on the human aspects of consumer marketing. Bob Wheatley, founder and CEO of Emergent, which bills itself as a “healthy living agency,” has long insisted that humans are emotional and sentient beings before they think; That’s how brains are wired. As a result, the long-standing emphasis on ingredients, nutrition and the science behind them in pet food marketing has often missed the boat, he claims.
“The most recent research into consumer attitudes and behavior shows that people remain emotional beings, basing decisions more on emotion than fact,” wrote Wheatley in March 2020, continuing growth in quality pet food. … However, the pet food industry is still bogged down in analytical rather than lifestyle marketing practices.”
(You can hear more marketing and branding insights from Wheatley on the Trending: Pet Food podcast, hosted and created by Lindsay Beaton, editor of Petfood Industry magazine.)
Linking marketing concepts with consumer drivers
In the webinar, Scantlebury pointed out that many pet food and treat brands reference humanization in their marketing and pets are definitely a priority for owners, but they still need to make quick decisions when dealing with cognitive overload and the dozens of things to do You have to think about it in a day. They make these decisions based on the emotional connections they have (or don’t have) with a brand.
So talking about your product’s attributes and functional benefits will only go so far. Building a narrative is key, and to do that you need to focus on what she calls the 4Cs in your market: culture, category, customer, and company. A thorough examination of all aspects of your product and brand will help you identify opportunities to resonate and be different – ie stand out. Additionally, she stressed that consistency across the “customer journey” (all elements of your marketing strategy and campaign) is key.
To illustrate some of Scantlebury’s points, Billy Frey, marketing director of Champion Petfoods and webinar co-moderator, walked through a case study his company conducted to differentiate its two proprietary brands, Orijen and Acana, to drive demand for each. After quantitatively assessing sales volume and how brands interact with each other (and others in the marketplace), he and his team looked at another set of four marketing concepts. In her case, it was the traditional 4 Ps: product, price, promotion and location.
This analysis helped them identify their channel strategies (part of the place) and each brand’s segmentation, marketing structure, and marketing mix (part of the advertising). One element of the segmentation process involved looking at psychographs: consumer drivers, both explained and latent, for their purchasing decisions.
Drivers of consumer behavior are in turn related to their emotions and how they affect their purchases. Key Takeaway: Your target customers are more than just numbers and demographics; They are people who are driven to choose and buy products and brands based on their emotional connections. And of course, emotions run particularly high when it comes to their fur (or scales or feathers) babies.