Storyboard: Stars and their pets a winning move

High-performance athletes and their pets star in an internet campaign aimed at putting animals through a 30-day healthy living campaign.

The problem

Purina One, a high-nutrition supermarket pet food, had been losing share in the dry dog food market.

Brand owner Nestle Purina PetCare and advertising agency Publicis Rainger believed they could turn the sales slide around through a sampling campaign designed to demonstrate the product's benefits to pet owners.

The concept had worked overseas, but the major challenge was to find a way to get potential customers engaged with the campaign.

The campaign

Pet owners who registered online for the Purina One 30-Day Challenge received a free bag of pet food, advice brochures and a discount coupon for their next purchase.

The owners were encouraged to buy and feed Purina One to their pet, score the animal's health for 30 days and then report back with their findings.

The campaign featured pet-owning sports stars Carlos Spencer, Sarah Ulmer and Hamish Carter, who put their own pets through the 30-day challenge.

Initial publicity for the campaign was through a public relations drive (by Singleton Ogilvy & Mather), supplemented with an advertising run across newspapers, magazines, the web, direct mail, in-store and on radio.

Brand manager Susan O'Brien said the advantage of the online registration approach was that the agency knew within hours what the most effective recruitment channels were.

"We could then adjust our channel selection accordingly," she said.

"We even decided to cancel a planned TV flight since the campaign was working so hard for us at the grassroots level."

The results

In 10 weeks more than 35,000 people registered to take part in the promotion, almost 40 per cent of whom had heard about the promotion from a friend.

Purina responded to over 19,000 consumers who sent personalised feedback on how their pet was doing.

The response rate surprised the company, which had to bring in extra staff to read and respond to the email feedback.

The company said its latest sales figures showed Purina One Dog sales were up more than 21 per cent compared with the same period of last year.

The lessons

Taking as much of the promotion as possible online produced benefits such as reducing the back-end costs of data capture. Creating a community of participants enabled it to generate positive word of mouth and referral.

Marketing technology company Touchpoint was employed to process customer information received and this enabled Purina to establish ongoing email contact as participants progressed through the 30-day programme.

That contact provided early indications of how much traction the campaign was gaining with the market - details which in the past would take several months to collate.