Building Emotion and Meaning

Get Real

Nature’s Variety pet food is poised to run away with the natural pet food category. A remarkable shift in their business opportunities fueled by the unprecedented outcomes of the Menu Foods recall. Hundreds of pet fatalities amidst troubling questions about pet food ingredients sent consumers on an extraordinary hunt for better and safer pet food. The natural pet food category today is dogged with an array of high quality boutique brands that lack distinction and unique positioning. How can Nature’s Variety differentiate itself in the midst of rampant sameness to grow their share?

Get Personal

We interviewed specialty pet food retail store owners and floor sales staff, veterinarians, pet nutrition experts, pet media and bloggers, and pet parents to better understand their perceptions of natural brands, pet nutrition and their motivations -- whether it be in selecting brands to buy or recommending them to others. We learned pet parents are frustrated with conflicting, confusing and in some cases disingenuous information about what constitutes a healthy pet diet. Who can we trust? What’s best for my pet? Are pet diets all the same?

Get Focused

The brand’s Super Target: pet owner Indulgers and Doters who are driven by a desire to express love for their four-leg family members through feeding a diet that will enhance their pet’s quality of life. Ultimately they have an abiding passion for shared experiences and close connection with their pets. So what, then, is the point of leverage to differentiate Nature’s Variety and generate sustainable growth?

Get Human

The strategic mission: we built a platform around a unique and own-able point of difference: The Rotation Diet. Nature’s Variety is the leading national brand in the emerging raw frozen food segment, and has pioneered recipes in the new grain-free category. Along with distinctive product formulation, the Nature’s Variety product portfolio, fed in rotation, can raise the bar on authentic dietary improvements for pets. Our goal is to establish Nature’s Variety as the nutrition education leader, and to showcase the emotional and transformational stories of pets whose lives have been changed and improved through the Rotation Diet.

Get Heard

• We enlisted renowned Veterinary and pet nutrition experts who support and believe in the Rotation Diet story as ambassadors.

• We also recruited pet parents with compelling stories to tell of results from feeding Nature’s Variety.

• We developed tools to serve up the platform to retail accounts, including a new Rotation Diet graphic for shelf communication.

• We held events to showcase the new Rotation diet campaign with pet media, storeowners and distributors.

• We created a national forum using Web video for our experts and pet parents to convey their support for the nutritional value of Rotating.

• We developed e-newsletters to explain the benefits of Rotation designed specifically for Veterinarians, retailers and consumers.

• We built a retail activation kit so the sales force could bring this message to new account presentations.

• We launched an editorial placement program to secure pet media coverage for the brand and diet – to date 26,000,000 impressions have been secured.
  

Nature’s Variety sales are up 20 percent, and are outpacing category performance.