BACKGROUND

PEDIGREE’s brand purpose is a simple one; to make the world a better place for dogs. One of the ways they do this is by bringing people and dogs together through adoption. To promote adoption, Pedigree creates an annual adoption drive campaign – designed to help more people become dog owners it also creates potential new customers allowing PEDIGREE to sell more dog food.

BRIEF

Create an adoption campaign to drive an increase in dog adoption enquiries with local shelters and also increase PEDIGREE sales.

INSIGHT

Not everyone wants a dog. They’re a big commitment and if the audience didn’t want, or wasn’t in the position to adopt, our message would be ignored. We needed to be smart about who we targeted. We needed to find the people in the best position to adopt a dog and then connect with them in the right way.

Current NZ dog ownership statistics showed that 78% of households with children aged 9-17 already had a dog. However, when it came to people over the age of 50, the number dropped to just over half, the lowest dog ownership rate of any age group Many of these older New Zealanders are entering a new stage of life: post kids. The adjustment once their children move out can be hard. This is known as Empty Nest Syndrome.

By targeting Empty Nesters, we had identified people with time, money and sufficient energy to care for a dog. Empty Nesters are used to running around after others and would benefit as much from having a dog as the dog would benefit from having them for companionship.

COMMS STRATEGY

We created a fun and cheeky platform called the PEDIGREE Child Replacement Program (CRP). The campaign encouraged Empty Nesters to replace the child-sized hole in their life with an adopted dog using the message: “When they move out, move on.”

We used a two-prong comms strategy to ensure we achieved our objectives of driving adoption enquiries and increasing PEDIGREE sales.

1. Driving Adoption Enquiries

We used media where the audience over-indexed in Kiwis aged 50+ and then tailored our creative specifically to those mediums, ensuring that it was as impactful as possible.

2. Increase PEDIGREE Sales

The second layer of our comms strategy was designed to reach as many New Zealanders as possible (beyond just empty nesters) and use the fun and cheeky tone of the campaign to get them talking about our initiative.

RESULTS

• CRP became PEDIGREE’s most successful Adoption campaign ever.

• It lead to an 824% increase in dog adoption enquiries compared to last year.

• PEDIGREE saw an 11% sales increase during the campaign.

• Since the campaign ended, PEDIGREE’s baseline weekly sales average has remained 8% above the pre-campaign period.

• The earned PR coverage CRP lead to 9,952,810 impressions (in a country of only 4.5m people).