Resuscitating Morris
It’s a myth that cats have 9Lives; they might have a tenth.
The venerable cat food with the clever name was on its last legs. It needed a new lease on life, and it would take the resuscitation of the iconic Morris the Cat mascot to bring 9Lives back from the brink.
The brand had shed 35% market share between 1999 and 2005. Del Monte Foods was set to drop the product before insightful marketing maneuvers revived it.
“This was a brand on the verge of extinction,” says Geoff Tanner, Del Monte senior brand manager.
Morris, the finicky cat, was passé, 9Lives had lost half of its consumer ad budget and Wal-Mart was threatening to drop the brand, Tanner recalls.
9Lives was being buried by IAMs and Purina. Both apparently were better at tapping into contemporary pet owners’ collective consciousness. Meanwhile, 9Lives’ advertising traditionally emphasized taste.
9Lives followed its competitors’ lead by conducting focus groups that revealed 82% of cat owners considered their felines family members. The research found that pet owners frequently have an underlying psychological need to nurture. A quarter of them adopt cats from animal shelters or as strays.
Identifying that deep well of compassion was central to the last-ditch effort, which began a year ago and was budgeted at only $5 million, a tenth of what was spent by Friskies, notes Tanner.
Within six months, the brand relaunch commenced with the introduction of 9Lives Daily Essentials, which pushed nutritional appeal at an alluring price point. The next year, the 9Lives Growing Years product was spawned by surveys that identified what cat owners wanted.
But the ultimate stroke was recasting Morris as mentor for Lil’ Mo, a spin-off kitten character for a Million Cat Rescue Campaign aimed at engaging consumers. The insight gained from those focus groups informed the launch of the Million Cat tour, at which “American Idol” judge Randy Jackson adopted Lil’ Mo in September 2006. The cat rescue tour has been on the road since then, in cooperation with more than 100 animal shelters nationwide.
“It wasn’t what they said. It was how they said it,” Tanner recalls, recounting people weeping when they spoke about their cats.
9Lives knew that only 48% of those interviewed in focus groups were willing to adopt. But it honed in on that segment, creating a bus with windows displaying cats and a “quiet room” where consumers could observe or interact with cats brought to events from local shelters. By year’s end, the trailer will have hit 180 event days attended by 450,000 people.
In September, Audrina Patridge, star of MTV’s “The Hills,” officially adopted the 500,000th cat of this tour. Other dividends: $500,000 in animal shelter donations, a 13% jump in 9Lives dry case sales and a 4% growth in market share for the brand.
The trailer tour produced a spin-off Sprinter Van Tour for some 300 events since May reaching 100,000 people, says Jeff Snyder, vice president of marketing for RedPeg Marketing, which handled the creative.
The concept included a mobile command center so children could see where the tour had been, interactive cat-centric computer stations and photo-ops with the current Morris.
Getting customer participation by engaging them in the rescue campaign was a key component, says Ryan Thomas, 9Lives brand manager.
The reincarnation of Morris through the Lil’ Mo character drove credibility and “freshened” the icon, he says.
Consulting its largest customers, including Wal-Mart, Kroger, Food Lion and Pet Smart, on the campaign was also important, inspiring the mini-van tour, Thomas says.
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