Marketing Hotline: Generational campaigns that get tails wagging

Marketing is full of all kinds of weird and wonderful acronyms. CTR, SMART, GANTT and OOH, which I once whipped out in an author meeting and was met with cries of ‘ooooh!’.

One of my favourite vague acronyms is FMCG. FMCG is a category of products and can roughly be defined as cheap products that sell quickly. Think milk, soft drinks, skincare and yes, even books.

We marketers also love to put consumers in general boxes. The baby boomers, millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. Call us lazy, but we need to segment audiences somehow to make sure we’re cutting through the noise and if you’re using the right data to justify your campaign decisions, most of the time you’ll deliver.

Today I’m focusing on one of the fastest growing FMCG industries who do generational marketing exceptionally well: pet food. The pet food market was valued at £3.8 billion in the UK alone last year, and forecasts are predicting that pet care spending will reach nearly $188 billion by 2028.

Who is driving that growth? Millennials, of course. We’re the generation catching heat for delaying parenthood, or simply deciding not to become parents at all. I can’t imagine why.

But anyway, we’re talking pets. Hands up, how many of you have agonised over what your pets are eating while in the same breath, lived on a diet of coffee and whatever carbs are lurking in your cupboard?

Generally, millennials (and Gen Z, who are older than you think these days, given the oldest are turning 27 this year) adore their furry companions.

I was once told by a friend that when they die, they hope they come back as one of my pets. The greatest compliment I think I've ever received. I was already fully signed on to upmarket pet foods after a decade of owning very spoiled, very loved cats. But getting a puppy at the beginning of the year was a feeding minefield. Wet or dry? Raw or homemade? The options are endless and the advice is often contradictory.

Given these challenges, and the fact that millennials are notoriously time-poor, how can pet brands tap into this? Well, they’re taking the wheel in inventive new ways, from the actual product and logistics right through to the consumer-facing marketing campaign.

Butternut Box - a fresh pet food subscription - recently caught my eye with their ‘Dogs Deserve Fame’ campaign. They’re cleverly flipping feline internet fame on its head to create brand awareness in a highly competitive environment. If cats can rule the internet, why can’t dogs enjoy a little fame too?

Last year’s campaign, ‘Give Mealtimes Their Moment’, involved a nationwide search to find the star of their next OOH (that’s out-of-home) campaign. They booked advertising space on over 1,500 billboards and 3 buses across the country, and used their social media channels to encourage pet parents to submit their canine pals along with a reason why they deserved a shot at the big-time.

This year, your dog could literally be turned into a work-of-art.

That’s right. According to their website, “We want to make some good boys and girls the star of their very own, exclusively-commissioned portrait. Five winning dogs will be drawn, painted or sculpted by a professional artist, with the portraits unveiled at a star-studded gallery event.”

This is genius for two reasons. If there’s one thing millennials love more than their pets, it’s sharing photos of their pets online.

Firstly, you’ve taken all of that love and adoration and turned it into organic, user-generated content that can be repurposed in other elements of your marketing. In this case, while you don’t need to be a Butternut Box customer to enter, you’re going to want brownie points by making sure your pet is on-brand. Every Butternut Box customer receives a free branded bandana in their first box, and many of the entrants made sure to dig that out.

Secondly, when the end user of your products is quite possibly one of the most adorable creatures on the planet, you 100% should be using them to help spread awareness of your brand and ultimately, drive sales. The first competition of this nature generated over 2,500 entries. When the prize is your pet being immortalised in a work-of-art and shown in a gallery, you can guarantee the entries will go wild.

Obviously, I entered.

Another marvellous D2C (direct-to-consumer) brand whose business model revolves around subscription boxes are BARK. Their BarkBox is a customised subscription box, sending out themed boxes with toys and treats tailored to your pet.

They’re a best-in-show example of using data-driven marketing to build a pack of loyal customers. Through customer surveys and careful analysis of their customer’s buying behaviours, they were able to create detailed segments that could be used to send targeted emails, boosting their revenue by up to 97%.

In an interview with CO, BARK’s VP of Lifecycle Marketing said: “We’re able to easily target audiences based on breed, age, and size, and also to customize the content of these emails based on those insights. No two dogs are alike, and every dog parent’s relationship to their pup is unique and special.”

The data-driven approach is impressive, but what I particularly love about BarkBox is that they don’t let KPIs and brand tone-of-voice get in the way of a good time.

They are firmly tapping into our desperate need for constant entertainment, with a reasonably lo-fi approach to Instagram, which focuses more on memes and satire rather than explicitly pushing the product 24/7.

My favourite moment is their annual National Squirrel Appreciation Day takeover. Every year, furious squirrels tired of overenthusiastic dogs making their lives difficult take to the BarkBox channels to air their dirty nutty laundry. One memorable year was the ‘Down with BarkBox’ campaign, which involved activist squirrels hijacking the channels and sparking conversation with memes. The BarkBox team took things a step further, pitching it as a PR crisis and sending out a fake press release to industry outlets, *chef’s kiss*.

That’s all for this week folks. But it would be wrong of me to write an entire Marketing Hotline about pet brands and fail to show off my own.

So, I leave you with my clan: Rory, Jasper, Celeste, Jacob and Robin. Feel free to post your own in the comments, frankly I'll be offended if you don't.

Rach x

P.S. After Friday’s post about Twitter’s downfall, I got a lot of messages from people who decided to set up a Bluesky account. If you want to follow me (and let me follow you in return), you can find me here.