Shaking things up in a stagnant market

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Sales of Pre­mier Vet Group’s under­per­form­ing pre­ven­ta­tive health care plan, Pet Care Plan, had start­ed to slow. The same pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als had been put under vets’ noses for sev­er­al years. New busi­ness was slug­gish and cus­tomer reten­tion under threat. How could they rein­vig­o­rate the brand and cap­ture a larg­er share of the market?

First, we need­ed to get a clear pic­ture of the cur­rent mar­ket, Pet Care Plan’s posi­tion and its rel­e­vant strengths and weak­ness­es. We also col­lat­ed insights into the needs of both vets and pet own­ers, and their atti­tudes to pets’ well­be­ing and pre­ven­ta­tive health plans.

Gen­er­al­ly, aware­ness of pre­ven­ta­tive health plans was low amongst con­sumers, who also tend to con­fuse these plans with pet insur­ance. Where­as vets see the plans as a tool to increase cus­tomer loy­al­ty, help gen­er­ate rev­enues and improve the health of pets in their care.

One of the key insights of the research was that, first and fore­most, vets want to be vets. They are dri­ven by the needs of the pets in their care and are some­times reluc­tant busi­ness peo­ple. Yet the need to make mon­ey is some­thing they can’t afford to ignore.

Plan

Our propo­si­tion had to be sim­ple — but also had to res­onate. Research taught us vets and own­ers essen­tial­ly want the same thing: to keep pets at their best. Which would form the basis of our cam­paign strategy.

We had to demon­strate that, by focus­ing on the sim­plic­i­ty of imple­men­ta­tion and ongo­ing sup­port, we could help vets to get on with their jobs, while still allow­ing them to pro­vide the best pos­si­ble care.

Com­peti­tor lit­er­a­ture fea­tured overused stock imagery of cats, dogs and rab­bits. To dif­fer­en­ti­ate, our cam­paign pho­tog­ra­phy had to show pets in nat­ur­al sit­u­a­tions – kit­tens chas­ing balls, dogs dig­ging down the back of sofas. Mes­sages had to strike a chord with pet own­ers; to move away from price and focus on the end goal – keep­ing pets at their best.

Deliver

As well as new brand­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy and cam­paign mate­ri­als, we also intro­duced the pre­fix ​‘Pre­mier’ to Pet Care Plan.

This brought the brand in line with Pre­mier Vet Alliance, the affil­i­at­ed Buy­ing Group, and helped to cement the con­no­ta­tion of high-qual­i­ty prod­ucts and service.