Purina One 30-Day Challenge

Background

The Purina One 30-Day Challenge - a high involvement sampling programme with a difference.

Purina ONE is a high nutrition food for cats and dogs available in supermarkets. It had been losing market share in dry dog food, despite having a compelling story to tell.

The brand owners wanted to run a sampling campaign to prove to pet owners that the product is superior by actually demonstrating it's benefits through a sampling programme called the Purina ONE 30 Day Challenge. This concept is proven overseas but the communication problem has always been how to get participants really engaged and involved in it. In the New Zealand campaign Nestle Purina PetCare and agency Publicis Rainger have solved this by using some insights into human behaviour.

In summary
Traditional advertising theory would have it that if you change perceptions then the behaviour will follow. This typically results in an approach in which the big ad campaign 'softens the defenses', and then the promotions, retail or direct marketing campaign mops up the dollars by driving consumer behaviour at a later stage.

Yet Consumer Psychology (Festinger 1957) shows us that it is difficult to get consumers to change their beliefs without first changing behaviour. In other words people change their attitudes in order to justify a new set of actions.

Action first.
Perception change second.

In this case the role of traditional advertising is to reinforce a new pattern of attitudes after a change in consumer behaviour.

The Purina ONE 30 Day Challenge is based on this basic tenet (now the traditional positioning ad campaign kicks off in the next few weeks with the task of reaffirming participants change in attitude).

Objectives

• Persuade dog and cat owners to feed their pets Purina One for 30 days
• Encourage a high level of awareness in owners of the changes in their pet's health from the change in diet
• Create buzz through word of mouth around the campaign
• Monitor closely the consumer participation and media effectiveness

Target Audience

Dog and Cat Owners who care strong about their pet's health and well being

Approach

The idea was to take as much of the programme as possible online. This approach had some obvious benefits such as reducing back-end costs such as data capture and harnessing the referral power of digital communications. Inherent in this was the belief that by creating a community of participants it should be possible to generate positive word of mouth and referral.

Less obvious benefits included a detail rich customer profile including current preferred brand and type and number of pets within the household. Using marketing technology from Touchpoint to capture these initial customer profiles via the web also provided the ability to establish ongoing email contact as participants progressed through the 30 days. This provided early indications of how much traction the campaign was gaining with the market. In the past with this type of promotion results could take several months to materialise.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly it opened up an easy channel for dialogue with consumers. It's easy to dash off a quick response to a question via email. The campaign encouraged this - and today’s consumers are happy to do just that. This has created an unprecedented level of engagement with the Purina One brand - and a customer service challenge for FMCG marketers engaging in this type of promotion, as we have had literally thousands of emails to reply to.

How it works
Consumers who register for the Purina One 30-day Challenge get a free bag of Purina ONE - advice brochures and a coupon for discounted future purchase. Owners are encouraged to buy and feed Purina ONE to their pet, score their pet’s health for 30 days and report back with their findings.

The campaign through Publicis Dialog (and Singleton Ogilvy & Mather - PR) featured passionate pet-owning celebrities Carlos Spencer, Sarah Ulmer and Hamish Carter. The three high performance athletes agreed to put their pets through the 30 Day Challenge and were themselves astonished with the results.

Initial media laid down included PR, press, magazine, web, direct mail, shelf vision and radio. Says Brand Manager Susan O'Brien, "the advantage of online only registration was that we knew within hours what the most effective recruitment channels were proving to be. We could then adjust our channel selection accordingly".
"We even decided to cancel a planned TV flight since the campaign was working so hard for us at the grass roots level."

How Touchpoint Technology Helped

• Managed database and all triggered communications via email and mail
• Managed all online registration
• Tracked response via mail, email, web and instore redemption
• Tracked response against media
• Provided realtime reporting on campaign

Results

In just over 10 weeks over 35,000 people have registered to participate. Almost 40% of participants heard of it from a friend.

The campaign has proven so successful that people have been talking about it in the chat rooms and bulletin boards of pet web sites. Purina has responded to over 19,000 consumers that have sent personalised feedback on how their pet is doing. (So much that Purina had to bring in extra people to read and respond to email feedback).

And product sales? Now in healthy growth mode, currently up 7.7% this quarter vs. same period last year.
(Source: ACNIELSEN DATA: $MAT to 16 May 04)