The pet food and treats market is a highly competitive arena with hundreds of brands competing to be seen on store shelves or e-commerce platforms. Pet owners frequently feel overwhelmed by all their choices when shopping for their furry friends’ meals and treats.
Consumers today face an immense “cognitive load,” with numerous thoughts, demands, and priorities competing for attention and action, according to Samantha Scantlebury of Signal Theory’s brand strategy director team – an integrated brand development, marketing, and design firm.
How can pet food and treat brands break through without adding to the din? Signal Theory’s website states it best: “It’s time to make advertising human again.” During a Petfood Industry webinar on September 13, 2022, Scantlebury used this theme as the starting point of her presentation “Pet food branding: How to stand out in a competitive market”.
Consumers Are Emotional Beings
Scantlebury and Signal Theory aren’t the first or only ones advocating a focus on human aspects when marketing to consumers. Bob Wheatley, founder and CEO of Emergent, which markets itself as the “healthy living agency,” has long insisted that humans are emotional creatures before thinking ones; that is simply how our brains function. According to him, pet food marketing campaigns that place too much emphasis on ingredients, nutrition or science often miss the mark entirely.
Wheatley wrote in March 2020, that research on consumer attitudes and behaviors shows that people remain emotionally-driven decision-makers. Pet ownership’s relationship to improved owner health and well-being could fuel growth of high-quality pet foods; however, pet food industries remain focused on traditional marketing approaches rather than lifestyle marketing approaches.
(You can hear more marketing and branding insights from Wheatley by listening to Lindsay Beaton, editor of Petfood Industry magazine.)
Tying Marketing Concepts to Consumer Drivers
In his webinar, Scantlebury highlighted how many pet food and treat brands include references to humanization in their marketing. While pets may be high on owners’ priority lists, making quick decisions in an ever-increasing number of scenarios requires making fast decisions based on emotional bonds (or lack thereof) with specific brands.
Solely discussing your product’s attributes and functional benefits won’t do. To create an engaging storyline about it, focus on what she refers to as the four C’s in your market: culture, category, customer and company. A thorough assessment will identify opportunities for resonance while standing out; consistent execution across your “customer journey” is vitally important as well.
Billy Frey, director of marketing for Champion Petfoods and co-presenter of the webinar, illustrated some of Scantlebury’s points with an engaging case study his company undertook to differentiate their brands, Orijen and Acana, from each other and drive demand for each. After conducting a quantitative assessment of dollar volumes and interactions among brands (and those on the market), Frey and his team examined another set of four marketing concepts; in their case it was the traditional 4Ps: product, price promotion and place.
Analysis was critical in honing their channel strategies (part of place), brand segmentations and marketing structure as well as mix (part of promotion). Psychographics provided insight into customers’ stated and latent drivers behind buying decisions.
Consumer behavior is driven by emotions and how those affect purchases. Therefore, your target consumers aren’t just numbers; they’re people – driven to buy products based on emotional connections to products/brands/people they connect with – especially when it comes to their fur (or scale or feather) babies!