Purina ONE

Challenging consumers through digital media

The Results

  • In just 10 weeks, more than 35,000 people had registered to participate. Almost 40% of participants heard of the campaign from a friend
  • The campaign proved so successful that people were discussing it in the chat rooms and bulletin boards of pet websites
  • Purina has responded to over 19,000 consumers that have sent personalised feedback on how their pet is doing (so many more than expected that Purina had to bring in extra people to read and respond to email feedback)
  • A 7.7% growth in in product sales from the same period of the previous year

The challenge

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 its 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, agency Publicis and Touchpoint have solved this issue by using some insights into human behaviour.

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
  • Closely monitor consumer participation and media effectiveness

The solution

The idea was to put as much of the programme online as possible. This approach had some obvious benefits, for example 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, this campaign 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 interaction, and today’s consumers are happy to comply.

The Challenge 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 worked

Consumers who register for the Purina ONE 30-Day Challenge get a free bag of Purina ONE, plus 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 featured passionate pet-owning celebrities Carlos Spencer, Sarah Ulmer and Hamish Carter. These three high performance athletes agreed to put their pets through the 30-Day Challenge and were themselves astonished with the results.

Initial media included PR, press, magazine, web, direct mail, shelf vision and radio. Says Brand Manager Susan O'Brien, "…the advantage of online-only registration meant 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

Marketing database management: Purina can manage their marketing database, view comprehensive reports and query, maintain and extract data securely.

Interactive messaging: gives Purina the ability to create and deliver personalised communications across different channels.

Content management: Purina can maximise their relationships with customers by managing and updating their web content.

Campaign management: Purina can create, execute and report on multichannel campaigns that interact with consumers in real time.

Reporting: real time reporting provides a dashboard view of databases and campaign participation, and can be used to track consumer behaviour.



Brand

Purina ONE

Campaign

Purina ONE 30-Day Challenge

Channels
  • Web
  • PR
  • Press
  • Magazine
  • Email
  • Direct mail
  • Shelf vision
  • Radio

Comany

Nestlé

Agency

Publicis

Target audience

dog and cat owners who care about their pet’s health and wellbeing