When it comes to the best way to promote a small business, rule number one seems to boil down to this: There are no rules.
Take Planet Dog, a manufacturer and seller of pet toys and supplies based in Portland, ME. The company bills itself as a “values-based” company of 21 employees (and 17 dogs) and markets premium-brand, eco-friendly pet toys, leashes, collars and beds, along with a line of gifts and apparel for “the dog lifestyle.” Both the toys and the ancillary products, such as a “Eurosticker” for cars that identify driver and pet as citizens of the “Woof” nation. Happy Labradors and golden retrievers and romping with their owners in the woods: Seems like a natural image to be marketed through a full-sized catalog, doesn’t it? And that’s exactly what Planet Dog used to do, every quarter for the last few years.
But the company was never quite able to justify the expense of sending out a catalog upscale enough to suit its brand. Planet Dog had expended as much effort on projecting that upscale image in its catalog as it does in its Web site. “The book was design-intensive, printed on 60-pound paper, and it was beautiful and fun to look at,” says marketing vice president Cathleen Frost. “But the economics weren’t there. The price point for a dog toy is fairly low, and that presented some issues for us.” In other words, it took a lot of $9.95 rubber footballs to pay for mailing a deluxe catalog.
The other issue for Dog Planet was where that catalog went. “We need a very targeted list in order to prospect,” Frost says. “We need to know that the people on that list own dogs. We don’t want just catalog shoppers who fall into a certain demographic—women 35 to 45 earning $75,000, all those traditional categories. I can get those names until I’m blue in the face, but they mean nothing unless they own a dog.” Planet Dog was not able to rent lists from the major pet magazines and did not have enough names of its own to interest competing pet suppliers, such as PetEdge or Doctors Fosters & Smith, in a list swap. “It’s a very competitive business,” Frost adds.
The low price points, the cost to prospect for select customers, and the expense of the catalog itself meant that the old way of getting the Planet Dog product line out there was just not going to work. So last fall Planet Dog decided that their autumn 2004 catalog would be their last for the foreseeable future. The company put its catalog on hiatus, started bundling items into “kits” to build its price points, and began to look for other, more organic ways to build a customer base.
As it turns out, the answer was e-mail, a loyalty program and careful attention to the branding power of philanthropy. Planet Dog conducts a strong e-mail marketing effort, sending out an average of 2 e-mail blasts a month to consumers who opt in on the company’s Web site. During the five weeks of this holiday season, the company cranked that up to one a week. Usually these mailings promote monthly specials and offer some sort of value-add to subscribers: free shipping, a free gift or a discount. Since Planet Dog manufactures the items they sell and in fact runs a profitable wholesale operation targeting resellers, the company can afford to cut their profit margin on select consumer items without wreaking havoc on the bottom line.
Frost says the high frequency of the e-mail campaign hasn’t caused any problems among customers. “Our unsubscribe rate is pretty low,” she says. “We’ve worked hard at establishing ourselves as a lifestyle brand, and our message resonates with people. We stress that we’re all part of a community or subculture of dog lovers.” Each e-mail blast creates a spike in both traffic and sales on the Web site; Frost tracks the open rate and conversion rate with custom software, and reports that both have trended upward since January 2004.
Planet Dog now counts about 6,000 members in its loyalty program, the P-Dog Club. Members get e-mail information and special offers, and can also register their dog or cat, including name, breed, size and birth date.
The company has also made notable efforts in what has been called “social entrepreneurship”—doing good business by doing good. The company began selling a special pink-ribbon version of its $10 “Ringo” dog ball with the promise that a portion of the proceeds would go to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Sales in the “Woof for a Cure” program have been strong enough that the company has now paid out nine-tenths of its $10,000 commitment to the foundation and is now in discussions with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for further fund-raising.
For the last four years, the company has also run a separate philanthropy that gives grants to ecological, humane and educational programs in its New England region.
These efforts are the right thing to do, Frost says, but they also work both to publicize the brand and to define it in the minds of consumers. In 2003, Planet Dog was named one of Fast Company’s Fast 50 Companies of the Year and had a cover story in Parade Magazine. And the day DIRECT Tips interviewed her, Frost had just finished shepherding a CNN camera crew around the Portland headquarters.
Frost has no problem saying that philanthropy helps the business. “I think those efforts have a lot to do with branding,” she says. “Everything funnels down into the image we’re trying to create of who Planet Dog is.”
For 2005, the company plans to hook into Amazon.com’s pet supply channel and continue with its full-force e-mail campaigning. But Frost is most interested in investigating affiliate programs. “I believe that’s where the lion’s share of shopping is going to happen, particularly as we target younger people who are getting into pet ownership for the first time,” she says. “I want to build a strong foundation in that channel and make sure that we have an e-mail address for 100% of our customers, so we can continue marketing them by e-mail.”
