Purely Purrrfection for Pets at Home.
The Marketing Society Star Awards 2009
Design Excellence Award 2009
02 Communication Excellence Awards –
Design Excellence
Word Count: 1,239
1.0 Background
Founded in 1991 from a single shop in Chester, Pets at Home now runs 220 stores nationwide. Their success has grown from their solid understanding of how much people value their pets and in 2007 they won Retailer Week’s Speciality Retailer of the Year award.
We are a country of pet lovers and the UK pet market is the biggest in Europe worth £2.5 billion a year. Decreasing living space and the rise in the number of working women has meant that the market has shifted from dogs to cats, with cats becoming the UK’s most popular pet.
Pets at Home is the ultimate experience and a pet owners paradise with aquaria, a bunny village, grooming salons and Companion Care. You can shop with your dog and they’ll even give your pooch a free biscuit at the till. The company has an acute appreciation of their audience and provides the best possible products and facilities to meet their needs.
2.0 The Marketing Situation
When you think of dry pet food you think of high tech nutrition, multicoloured biscuits
and Iams. Pets at Home own brand products follow this formula with super healthy ingredients, highly nutritious content and the best in high performance dry food to get the best out of your pet.
Pets at Home had picked up on the consumer trend of being more aware and conscious of what we eat and where our food has come from. This trend was supported by some market research carried out by Elmwood on pet ownership, which highlighted the humanisation of animals. This trend is called Anthromorphism, where people see their pets as having human qualities.
The combination of the two meant there was an opportunity to create something original in the sector. The human desire for fresh, natural ingredients and provenance was now something Pets at Home wanted to apply to their own brand pet food.
They wanted to diversify their offering with a new high-end category that focused on top quality ingredients. The kind of product that would create more of a good, better, best structure. This would be the equivalent of an organic, free from, Taste the Difference, all singing all dancing, better than the rest product for pets.
These luxury products have no artificial colours or preservatives, they are hypoallergenic, gluten free and benefit from added vitamins and antioxidants. Meat and fish content is
high and the ingredients are as natural as they get. They come wet and dry in both pouches and cans.
3.0 The Audience
Our insight was that when people love their pets they really will do anything for them. From doggy diamonds to waterproof raincoats, pet owners love to spoil their furry friends. As far as they are concerned, their pets should eat as well as, or sometimes better than, them. They will often cook a chicken or a special piece of fish for the cat. They will share their starter, main course and dessert and they might even let their pet lick the plate clean.
The audience simply want the best for their pets and if there is a high end, nutritious product with ‘all good’ ingredients then they will snap it up.
4.0 The Brief
Our brief was to develop a new brand identity to include packaging, name and tone of voice. The brand needed to be flexible to work across a broad product range and it needed to be original in the sector whilst familiar to the consumer. This was a product that needed real shelf stand out to make an impact as a new category.
5.0 The Solution
Because the audience expects their pets to eat as well as them our first port of call was an extensive audit into the human food market. We were looking for visual and verbal cues that consumers were familiar with when choosing ‘natural’ food products. That way we could apply a common visual language to a new and original product.
Everything about the brand needed to say natural, healthy and wholesome. We developed the brand name ‘Purely’ to reflect the quality and natural ingredients of the food. This is a simple, memorable name that immediately communicates the product benefit.
A hand drawn illustration style tells a visual story of provenance with ingredients drawn to look rustic and wholesome. The style is reminiscent of potato printing and uses a natural and earthy colour palette. Each pack features an illustration, which indicates the life stage and flavour of the product. To carry the idea through to the smallest detail small paw prints were used to represent the ellipsis in the identity.
A flash device draws attention to the high meat or fish content and a transparent, cat shaped window allows people to see the product before they make a purchase. This backs into the idea there is nothing to hide and everything is healthy, wholesome and free from any added nasties. The packaging itself is 100% recyclable with uncoated, natural coloured board to continue the rustic theme.
Talking to the customers was a really important part of communicating the brand story. A quirky, playful and down to earth tone of voice was created to show empathy with pet owners and how the company know and love pets too.
The personality of Purely is serious about health and nutrition but good fun and playful. A light touch is applied to the language and a pleasant, honest, conversational tone is carried through every element, giving the brand real stand out.
Delicious duck and liver, chompingly good chicken, crunchy yummy fishy pieces and prime beef and veggies are just some of the flavours.
This is “a totally natural, seriously healthy, distincitively delicious selection of feline delicacies, especially prepared for the pleasure of your cat. Choose from chicken with beef, lamb, duck or liver. Mmmm…eow!”
Apparently you will get “quadraphonic purring…every time you open a pack of seriously healthy, seriously tasty Purely chicken and liver.”
After the name, identity, packaging and tone of voice were defined we put together a comprehensive set of guidelines. These were be used alongside a brand toolkit to help store managers promote, implement and merchandise the Purely brand in store.
6.0 The Creative
7.0 The Results
From launch to December, Purely Wet grew in participation from 0.03% to 7.79% and Purely Dry 2.12% to 4%. In the 6 weeks to January 2009 like-for-like sales across Pets at Home were up a record 10.4% and total sales from March were up 13.4%.
These results are particularly impressive considering the tough economic climate for retailers and given that this is a premium product at a time when consumers are cutting back.
The Chief Executive, Matt Davies, was delighted with the group’s performance and partly attributed the success, and the improved margins, to the strategy of expanding the brand ranges they offer. He said “our food sales have been particularly encouraging over the Christmas period and we continue to delight our customers with exciting products, like our new cat range of natural treats”.
Purely has been the most successful cat product launch at Pets at Home and they are now planning range extensions, including low carb varieties.
Feedback from consumers has also been incredibly positive, and even the cats have something to say about the packaging “Both my cats purr as soon as they see the box”.