The 23-year-old pet food brand highlights messy pet moments in its first full-funnel marketing campaign. Chief marketing officer Miki Dosen details the campaign’s inspiration, strategy and early results.
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.
“We wanted to make sure that we were telling people we’re pet parents too. We get it. And despite all of the craziness, we still ultimately always want to do right by our pet,” Dosen said. “The common theme is that regardless of what we face as a pet parent, we’re all committed to feeding our pets the best.”
Deploying the campaign
The campaign has four different themes, such as a muddy pet or a stuffing explosion, which all highlight a dog making a mess. The creative runs across connected TV, YouTube, social media, and digital billboards in Chicago, Seattle and Denver. The Honest Kitchen placed the out-of-home creative near dog parks and veterinarian offices.
The Honest Kitchen also hired six influencers to share their “oh no” moments with their pets to further drive the message home. It plans to deploy those throughout the course of the year and hire more.
It plans to do a national giveaway of a year’s worth of pet food in May. Plus, it hosted two in-person events with mattress brand Naturepedic in New York City and Los Angeles, to further highlight the campaign with product giveaways and pet portraits.
Previously, The Honest Kitchen has only tapped into performance marketing and had those tangible results to measure performance. For this campaign, it is looking more broadly for how it measures success, such as reach, impressions, engagement with content, share of voice in the category and brand sentiment, she said.
“While conversion and sales is still of course extremely important, as we move into those kind of more top-of-funnel, brand building channels, for us it’s really about exposing people to the brand,” Dosen said.
In the second half of the year, the brand will conduct a marketing mix analysis to measure the results of each channel. Return on ad spend could be anywhere from $3 to $12, depending on the channel, she said. The brand will measure sales lift and incrementality in the three markets it targeted with the out-of-home advertisements compared with other markets to see if that was a good addition to its campaign.
Early results
The campaign already has generated positive results for The Honest Kitchen, Dosen said. Its YouTube video ad surpassed 3 million views in the first three weeks it was live. What’s more, the pre-roll advertisement has a 95% completion rate.
“Obviously, the ads are resonating and people are watching them to completion, which has been great,” she said.
For the contest giveaway, the brand has more than 2,500 entries, which is well beyond the few hundred it thought it would receive.
Long-term vision
Pet food is a purchase that shoppers typically set and forgot, and it takes a long lead time to get shoppers to switch, Dosen said. With that in mind, the brand knows it might take several exposures for shoppers to purchase the product compared with a different type of consumer package goods product, she said.
Still, The Honest Kitchen has high expectations for this campaign, as it knows it has a strong product and a message that will resonate with its target market, she said. Dosen was able to get buy in from management for this first fully integrated campaign because of this.
“When we were able to show an amazing deep insight when we cracked the campaign with ‘feed them the best, whether they deserve it or not,’ and couple that with some of the data and the statistics that we have in terms of the loyalty, it was almost a no brainer,” she said. “It’s kind of like the more people who find out about us, the more pets we’re able to put on the path to good health.”
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