PetPlease.com Marketing Plan
Table of Contents
1) Product Introduction 3
2) Mission Statement 5
3) SWOT Analysis 6
4) Competitive Advantage 8
5) Strategic Direction 9
6) Marketing Objectives 9
7) The External Marketing Environment 10
8) Consumer Decision Making Process 17
9) Factors Influencing the Consumer Buying Decision 20
10) Market Segmentation 21
11) Product Description 22
12) Product Placement and Distribution 27
13) Promotional Campaign 29
14) Product Pricing 33
15) Evaluation and Control 34
PetPlease.com: Online Pet Services
1) Product Introduction
PetPlease.com is a website specializing in connecting pet owners with qualified and caring veterinary and pet services from the convenience of their own homes. The pet population in the United States is robust, with a total dog population of approximately 69,926,000 and a total cat population of approximately 74,059,000. Overall, it is estimated that 36.5% of U.S. households own dogs and 30.4% of U.S. households own cats (American Veterinary Medical Association, 2012 U.S. Pet Ownership & Demographics Sourcebook); in fact, population estimates suggest that dogs now outnumber children in San Francisco (www.sfgate.com, "S.F.'s Best Friend" by Meredith May).
Pet ownership is rewarding and provides love, affection, and companionship. However, in addition to the fun memories that come with owning a pet, there are also serious responsibilities. Pets must be groomed and fed, and, even if it's only a routine checkup for annual shots, they require trained medical care. Pet owners are responsible for finding someone to perform these services, booking an appointment, and taking their pets to the appropriate location, whether it is a grooming salon or veterinary office, to keep those appointments. PetPlease.com seeks to eliminate the hassle of the last step by providing easy access to veterinarians, groomers, and pet personal chefs who make house calls.
Similar to online booking agents such as www.zocdoc.com or www.opentable.com, PetPlease.com offers up-to-the-minute appointment books and scheduling information for qualified and prescreened pet service professionals. Pet owners can request a certain time period for availability, and PetPlease.com will provide accurate information for in-home appointments. By reviewing the up-to-date information, pet owners can easily identify convenient times for them to have their pets examined or served in the comfort and convenience of their own homes.
Although each of the potential pet service providers listed is already prescreened for proper qualifications (e.g., certified veterinarians, trained groomers, etc.), PetPlease.com also features a rating system so that pet owners can read and leave reviews and notes in their own words of the services provided and the service providers themselves. To add to its personalized experience, PetPlease.com stores information for each pet so that the service providers can access the pet's history, regardless of who previously treated him or her. For example, no matter who in the PetPlease.com network previously provided the service, the current veterinarian will have a pet's full medical history, and the current groomer will have notes and pictures of the past grooming services performed on the pet. Finally, as an exclusive feature to its customers who book their appointments with the site, PetPlease.com also hosts a live chat for 24/7 access to a veterinarian in order to provide instant feedback on pet health concerns. The live chat gives pet owners peace of mind so that they know whether they should take their pet to an emergency room veterinarian immediately or if the concern can wait until a normal at-home appointment can be scheduled through PetPlease.com.
PetPlease.com's founder, Audrey Jeung, has been a proud and devoted owner of a rescue shelter cat for over seven years. Based on her own experiences as a cat owner and after speaking with other pet owners, she recognized that the "necessary" pet appointments that a pet requires can really add up in terms of time and money. In addition to that, the multiple attempts to force her cat into a cat carrier – usually when the cat is doing everything in his power to evade such capture – made trips to the vet an even more stressful experience. She loves her cat, but dreads the idea of having to put him into a carrier. Audrey has many friends who are also pet owners, and they often have traded war stories revolving around trying to wrestle their cats into carriers – with evidence of the cat scratch battle scars to prove it. Pet appointments are a necessary hassle, and due to inconvenient hours of business, many pet owners either have to take time off from work in order to make appointments or try to squeeze in an appointment on the weekends, which are the busiest time slots. Audrey believes that pet appointments are stressful enough to begin with; an easy at-home option would eliminate part of that stress.
Currently, the vast majority of pet owners need to contact their individual pet service providers to make the appointments and then find the time to take their pets into a physical office to meet with a professional. Some individual veterinarians and grooming salons offer online appointments, but that requires the pet owner to find the individual website and book their appointments. In terms of online competition, a website feature titled Vet Finder was recently launched in August 2013 on www.petcarerx.com to allow for online booking of local veterinary appointments.
Unlike Vet Finder, however, PetPlease.com offers something new to the market by focusing on in-home care for pets, from veterinary house calls to in-home grooming. In addition, PetPlease.com offers personalized attention, such as the medical records, grooming records, and a chat system, for pet owners to fulfill their pet's needs easily and efficiently. PetPlease.com makes pet owners' lives easier by cutting back on travel time and the time needed to find and book an appointment. In exchange for listing their services, for which the pet professionals pay a nominal monthly fee, PetPlease.com receives a commission from the service providers for each of the services booked on the website. Even with the commission that PetPlease.com collects, though, PetPlease.com reduces its service providers' overall costs by eliminating the need to rent and maintain a physical location such as a veterinary office or grooming salon.
PetPlease.com focuses on busy pet owners who would rather remain in the comforts of their own home and let their pet's professionals come to them than make extra time-consuming trips with their pets in tow. In order to achieve a societal marketing orientation, PetPlease.com will donate a portion of its commission to animal shelters that are local to the areas in which the pet owner lives, such as the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Furthermore, PetPlease.com will also seek partnerships with both pet stores and local animal shelters and charities so that patronizing a particular store, volunteering at a shelter, or donating to a charity will entitle the pet owner to a one-time discount code on their services booked on PetPlease.com.
The following is a detailed marketing plan for PetPlease.com's website and the services it provides.
2) Mission Statement
PetPlease.com's mission is to maximize the joy of having a pet in your life by minimizing the stress of owning one.
3) SWOT Analysis
Strengths
· Internet business with a small footprint; no need for a physical location (at least initially).
· Start up costs for website are relatively low.
· Only website focusing on in-home pet care.
· Saves pet owners time and money.
· Services are priced competitively.
· Offers 24/7 online veterinary advice.
· Data required is, for the most part, already existing or will create itself (i.e., vets providing house calls, users will provide reviews of in-home service providers).
· Owner's personal experience as a pet owner; knows what services for which a pet owner would prefer a convenient, in-home option.
· Pet industry is stable; people will always have pets and will always require care for them.
· Owner has a degree in Communication Studies (Mass Media) and can leverage that knowledge towards understanding how best to reach her target audience.
· Owner is a lawyer and has experience in collecting vast bodies of data and assembling it into easily digestible information.
· Owner has personal connections with skilled website and app developers.
· Customer oriented business focusing on providing convenient pet care to pet owners.
· Societal orientation in supporting animal shelters and charities.
Weaknesses
· Little experience running a business or website.
· Little skilled knowledge of veterinary field, grooming industry, or pet personal chef field.
· Must hire aforementioned skilled website developers, which may be costly.
· Could be costly to maintain 24/7 veterinary availability.
· Reliable server and host may be difficult to find and costly.
· Focus may be too broad for customer identification of the PetPlease.com brand.
· IT support for website could be difficult to find and costly.
· Gathering database of veterinarians, groomers, pet chefs, etc., could be time-consuming.
· Reliability of certification process/certification could be difficult to verify. Potential for liability if certification is not consistent and trustworthy.
· Undetermined whether there is a large enough body of service providers in given geographic area to be able to claim it is convenient for pet owners to choose the in-home care option.
Opportunities
· Booming pet population: ~36.5% of U.S. households own dogs and ~30.4% of U.S. households own cats. Pet population is steadily on the rise (e.g., from 51 million in 1998 to 69 million in 2005).
· In San Francisco, the number of dogs in the city outnumbers the number of children under 18 years of age.
· Pet owners are notorious for spoiling their pets and will appreciate a service that makes their pets more comfortable (i.e., examined and groomed in the home instead of a foreign place of business).
· The number of specialty pet services has increased in the past five years; in-home care easily fits into that niche.
· There is currently an overabundance of veterinarians in the field, so new graduates can become in-home care providers without needing to set up an office.
· Strategic partnership opportunity with http://www.vetlive.com/ in order to provide the 24/7 veterinary care without needing to employ own staff.
· Excellent option for elderly people who may want to have a pet, but are not mobile enough to take them to appointments.
· May be marketed towards owners of elderly pets that are not very mobile. Also, pet owners with elderly pets may find more comfort in having their pets pass away at home rather than at the vet's office.
· Opportunity to expand into other internet-provided pet services, such as pet product delivery (e.g., pet food, pet medications, etc.).
Threats
· A competitor website that was launched in August 2013 for online booking of vet appointments has the potential to be a threat if it expands and focuses on in-home care and non-veterinary services.
· Pet owners may be hesitant to allow pet care providers into their homes.
· Veterinarians and other pet providers may be hesitant to travel to a private home.
· Consumer perception that in-home or on-call care is more expensive.
· Costs of maintaining the website can rise unexpectedly, and reliability of internet service is not in the company's control.
· More brick-and-mortar offices and business locations may open, thus providing pet owners with enough convenient traditional pet care options.
· Pet owners may not want to provide reviews for database.
· Pet owners' homes may not be suitable for in-home care.
4) Competitive Advantage
PetPlease.com will employ a product/service differentiation competitive advantage. The company will focus on superior database management as well as strategic partnerships to create economies of scale and a unique informational and practical service that provides value and cost-savings to consumers. PetPlease.com is committed to collecting and maintaining the most accurate and extensive database of in-home pet care providers for major metropolitan areas. The database will be updated in real time and offer easy appointment booking for busy pet parents.
Furthermore, through strategic partnerships with existing websites as well as brick-and-mortar animal shelters and companies, the company will tailor its service to its customers' needs and preferences while keeping the cost of the service affordable and easy to manage. Owning a pet shouldn't be a challenge in finding the right information and ensuring the people who provide your pet's services are trustworthy. PetPlease.com's service will create a database of easily-accessible information to streamline the "necessities" in having a pet.
5) Strategic Direction
As a brand new website that will feature online booking of in-home pet services and be introduced to pet owners who have previously not booked their pet services online, PetPlease.com will adopt a diversification strategy.
6) Marketing Objectives
· Advertise in at least five local newspapers and publications to find pet service providers that perform house calls by the end of the first two weeks.
· Gather and organize Yellow Pages pet service provider data within the San Francisco Bay Area by the end of the first month. We will also seek partnerships with online directories such as Yelp to create a robust database.
· Sign a contract with a reliable web host within the first month. We will achieve this goal by comparing prices and reviews of at least three web hosts as potential hosts for the PetPlease.com website and selecting the best fit for the company.
· Develop and launch a functional and navigable PetPlease.com website by the end of the first six weeks. We will achieve this by hiring a team of hard working and talented website developers.
· Enter into contracts with at least 50 veterinarians, 20 groomers, and 10 pet personal chefs by the end of the first six weeks. We will achieve this goal by clearly explaining the benefits of listing their services on PetPlease.com and informing them that they would only pay a minimal monthly administrative fee to create their page and maintain their appointment calendars. Thereafter, the only fees will be a commission charged at the time of the actual booked appointment. In order to attract the providers at the outset, the company will offer the providers discounts to sign up for the site.
· Promote the launch of PetPlease.com by placing ads in at least five local newspapers and publications to advertise PetPlease.com's services within the first two weeks after the website's launch.
· Attract 5,000 hits on the website by the end of the first three months after its launch. We will achieve this through advertising with print ads, online advertising, and creating word of mouth with social media.
· Promote the PetPlease.com brand by partnering with and supporting at least five local animal shelters and/or animal charities by the end of the first three months.