Solving the Puzzle to Build the Best Pet Food Brand Ever

What if you had a blank sheet of paper and could design the most successful, high growth pet food business imaginable. What would it look like? How can you move past entrenched brands and businesses to secure a remarkable share in a mature marketplace? What can you do to grow at a faster pace than the category and competition?

No matter what brand or business you lead now, some of the insight expressed here can be deployed to improve your outcomes, even when it isn’t a “new design from the ground up.”

Here we will discuss the anatomy of best business and brand building practices. First let’s settle some existing assumptions.

This isn’t about inventing a secret sauce formulation. Meeting AAFCO standards will inevitably draw formulations closer to each other when addressing the approved guidelines for pet nutrition. Ingredient quality differences exist to be sure, but always within the guardrails of pricing consumers are willing to pay. Artisanal quality foods are niche, narrow and growth won’t reach past the higher income households that are willing to spend at that level.

This isn’t about starting with unlimited resources because you are backed by a large strategic or equity investor. Capital definitely helps, but candidly bigger budgets don’t ensure success and the bureaucracy of a mega-sized parent or a profit driven, risk mitigating funder can occasionally tug decisions in wrong direction. Especially when extraordinary performance springs from moves that are nimble, unexpected, novel, fast, fearlessness and innovative.

This isn’t about solving a gap in the current market. Yes, white space opportunities can create an opening but a niche solution for a niche issue my narrow the addressable market right out of the gate. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

This isn’t about buying your way in through acquisition of an established brand you believe you can improve. Legacy perceptions of strength and value are entrenched and changing the world view of an existing business is difficult to do. It’s a solid play to be sure but what you’re mostly getting is a functioning supply chain infrastructure, standing distribution and some degree of brand awareness. That said refurbishing and rebuilding the legacy brand “car” from the frame up could deliver incremental opportunities with the right leadership team.

Foundational Thinking and Philosophy

Exceptionalism and superior performance can be designed into the business model based on how you see the brand and what’s embedded in your mission and belief system. By definition, this will be counterintuitive. The standard pet brand building rulebook will not deliver break-through level results. Moving from a desire to provide optimal nutrition to dogs and cats won’t fuel the rocket either. Admirable but not transformational. Exceptional, high quality, science backed pet food is table stakes. If you don’t start with that foundation underneath nothing works. But it isn’t the basis of extraordinary business results either, given the ubiquity of this motivating principle across the industry.

You are not in the pet food business. You are actually in the pet parent relationship building business and thus recognize that pet food is the consumer’s number one instrument to express the love and care they have for furry family members. Better nutrition = better quality of life, wellbeing and longevity. That said the game you’re playing springs from relevance to the consumer’s pet lifestyle, needs and relationship with their pets. If you place the consumer at the center of your business model and work backwards from there, what does that look like?

Suddenly your brand story isn’t just about nutrition, ingredients and recipes. Now you are looking for every point of alignment you can credibly develop around pet parent aspirations and goals concerning the issues and decisions they will encounter over their pets’ lifespan. Your brand has just become the AI oracle of pet care. Your value proposition is deeper now than a food manufacturer who sees its mission solely to make high quality pet food. Again, that’s table stakes.

You’re building content and communication around pet:

Behavior

Wellness

Training

Travel experiences

Lifestyle

Grooming

Health

Aging

Experiences

Memories

Plus investing in creating a community of like-minded pet parents who share these common goals and want to celebrate experiences with their pet.

Zig vs Zag Theory

The pet food business is unique in the CPG world due to rampant sameness and similarity between brands in product, packaging, claims, narrative and use of familiar tropes and images to amplify the value proposition.

You can start by taking the traditions and common brand behaviors in the business to construct a roadmap of practices and beliefs that are replicated by most companies in the business. Now look critically at these rules and determine how to break them, how to push unique and different into the entire proposition. Said another way, to zig when everyone else zags. Why does this matter? For the very reason humans are drawn to what’s different and unique, not what’s marginally better than the status quo.

• How could this thinking impact your story?
• What can you do to reconceptualize and design packaging differently?
• How could you pursue a novel approach to the supply chain?
• How does this impact hiring and the talent you bring into your organization?

What can you do that no one else does? How can you build a distinctive category of one?

Don’t Focus on the Competition

It’s typical in the pet food business to closely monitor the competition in your market segment and plot ways to improve on or perhaps even replicate the product portfolios you see around you. However, the goal is to build a distinctive brand and business, not one that is marginally better than the others on shelf. Monitoring the competition leads the leadership team to focus on ‘better than’ thinking, which in truth commoditizes the business right out of the gate – it reinforces that all products are the same, only yours is a bit better. Trivial distinction is not the path to out-sized business results — or standing out in a sea of sameness. Instead refocus on solving problems others ignore.

Distinctive Communication

Most advertising in the pet food business follows similar themes, even to the degree you could swap brand names and the story would still work because the narrative is so common. “That’s why” communication tends to fall into this trap. Chasing awareness for its own sake is not the recipe for leaping past other brands. Sound strategy is the difference maker. To wit, in 2023 Farmer’s Dog delivered the highest scoring ad at the Super Bowl. It broke all the rules. The long form video run online was a spectacular example of differentiated communication, telling the story of a young girl and her dog over the course of her life, celebrating the bond and relationship she has with her dog. Not one word is spoken. There’s no time devoted to talking about nutrition or recipe or product. The food shows up in the story as an enabler. It was captivating, poignant, emotional and distinctive. The creators knew the power of emotion to drive brand purchase, not logic and feature/benefit selling.

Recognizing the AI Oracle

For the first time in the history of brand marketing, a super-smart machine steps between the brand and consumer as intelligent guide to help consumers make decisions. It speaks like another human, has no ax to grind and backs up its recommendations with source material and data. Agentic AI has arrived. LLMs openly admit that in the absence of being informed in the right way about a brand and its bona fides, they may miss the story, say something incomplete or inaccurate. We are at the dawn of Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO) and the brands that get this right will be the marketplace winners in a transformed business environment where consumers will come to rely on their agentic advisors to help decide on brands and purchases.

Permission

For that matter, given perceived risk sits at the front door of every purchase decision, brands that strategically deploy ‘permission’ tools to alleviate risk and credibly validate and verify their story will win more hearts and minds. This is driven mostly by the effective deployment of outside experts, Veterinarians, trusted forms of communication through journalism and seeking the endorsement of third-parties who can authenticate what you want consumers to believe.

Bravery

The essence of this radical design for a break-through brand spins on the axis of bravery in challenging old assumptions and practices, being willing to lean into counterintuitive thinking and practices that drive distinction into your proposition. Here’s the most profound advice we can give: the brand that gets closest to the consumer wins. That means the consumer is your first priority. The brand exists to serve their pet lifestyle needs and desires, a larger and deeper calling than confining your business plan to making a high-quality bag of kibble.

When you start to think this way, great things can happen because the marketplace of pet parents will notice you and pay attention to your story. When its founded on help over hype, you’ll earn a legion of devoted followers and evangelists. Tough to do but worth the journey.

Robert Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Emergent can help pet brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity and deeper meaning in their pet parent relationships and brand communication.