Editor’s Note: The Honest Kitchen, a 23-year-old pet food brand, has launched its first-ever full-funnel marketing campaign following a sizeable retail distribution increase. In a piece from Chief Marketer Network pub Multichannel Merchant, Chief Marketing Officer Miki Dosen details the campaign’s inspiration, strategy and early results. Below is an excerpt from the piece; head to Multichannel Marketer for the full article.
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For the first time in its 20-plus years, pet food company The Honest Kitchen launched a full-funnel marketing campaign.
With its launch into PetSmart stores across the U.S. and Canada, the brand’s distribution footprint increased 16% year over year, and the time was right to invest in a marketing campaign, said Miki Dosen, chief marketing officer of The Honest Kitchen.
The Honest Kitchen launched in 2002 and sells human-grade pet food. In addition to PetSmart and Petco, the brand sells its products on its own direct-to-consumer website, Amazon, Chewy and in 7,000 independent pet stores.
The brand has “extremely loyal” customers, with 96% of customers saying they would recommend The Honest Kitchen to friends and family, Dosen said. Plus, on its own website, more than half of its orders are from shoppers who have a subscribe-and-save account with the brand, she said.
“It depends and varies by channel, but extremely, extremely high stickiness,” Dosen said about its brand.
“Ultimately, with things like the expanded distribution and the amazing growth we’ve had over the last several years, it just felt like the right time to really step out there and do something on a bigger scale,” she added.
The Campaign Creative
Conversations with its customers inspired the tagline and creative for its campaign: “Feed them the best. Whether they deserve it or not.” The Honest Kitchen receives feedback from an online panel of 10,000 pet owners that it surveys, focus groups and chatting with customers in store.
A common theme it discovered was how owning a pet can be messy and chaotic with low moments. Despite this, owners have a deep unwavering love for their pets, and they are still going to feed them the best food no matter what.
This was a great insight that rang both true and unique in the category, Dosen said. Many pet category ads focus on the dog or highlighting the dog in a certain way. So the campaign aims to highlight the messy truth about owning a pet—its name is The Honest Kitchen after all.
For the full piece, head to Multichannel Marketer.
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