We all know the pet industry is growing every day, and as I have mentioned in previous blogs, it is important that we continue to do market research and monitor industry trends. Now, I want to discuss how to revitalize our brands if we realize that we are starting to sell less of our products or have fewer bookings for our services. Everyone faces challenges that can affect the performance of our brand, but diagnosing the issues that are causing those changes allows us to plan our strategies in order to revitalize our brand and better position ourselves in the pet industry market.
First Step = Diagnosing the Problem
- Not Enough Customers: If you know that you have a great product or service but can’t seem to get enough customers in the door to reach the profit goals and objectives we have for our business, it may be time to take a deeper look at your marketing strategies and see if the problem may be brand awareness or reach. This could be because we are targeting the wrong audience or maybe we have the right audience but are not achieving the engagement we want from the marketing campaigns we have aimed at those audiences.
- Product or Service Failure: If we realize that we have started to lose customers after they make a purchase from us or begin to receive negative reviews and feedback about our products and services, the issue may be with our product quality or the services themselves. We have a brand promise and message developed into the identity of our brands for a reason; if we are not meeting customer expectations, providing a poor user experience, or no longer providing the best value to our customers, it may be time to look at changing our offerings or at least adjusting them to make improvements.
Strategizing for Not Enough Customers
If you are not hitting your KPI goals when it comes to reaching the right amount of customers, then you may need to look at ways of increasing the brand’s market share to improve market penetration. It’s important to check competitors’ metrics for brands that are similar to yours, and if you see they are performing better than your brand, look at what marketing strategies they use with their audience. By doing some market research to see what they are doing right and seeing what best practices are in the industry, you can implement some of these tactics and work towards gaining higher engagement for your brand.
Internally, it is important to also look at our target audiences’ customer behavior, preferences, and purchasing patterns. It may be beneficial to focus more on segmenting your brand’s audience and personalizing communications to make sure we are reaching the right customers with the right message at the right time.
The digital age has been here for a bit now, and if your brand hasn’t already taken full advantage of creating a strong digital presence on social media channels and creating content that showcases your products or services, now may be the time to spend more time and budget on this. It’s important to stay engaged with the pet owners who are our clients and, whenever possible, share user-generated content and community-building efforts to help build deeper connections with the audience.
Embrace promotions by offering customers deals or rewards programs that aim to move them to that purchase stage and keep them coming back long-term. Have your regular customers become influencers for your brand. Partner with these loyal customers or even pet industry influencers who already have a large following to help share your brand with their audiences and potentially reach new segments.
Strategizing for Product or Service Failures
If you realize that your problem lies deeper, and the issue is that you are having a product or service failure, you are no longer providing offerings that deliver on their promises. Market research can help you look at customer feedback and understand where your products or services may fall short. Adjustments can be made by asking customers directly through quantitative or qualitative methods and getting real-time feedback that can help us make the changes needed to get us back into the top-of-mind position with our target audience.
If, after speaking to customers, you find that service delivery or customer interactions are where things went wrong, then you can work on improving response times to customer inquiries and better supporting them throughout their customer journey. The goal is always to make the user experience the best it can be, whether that is through in-person interactions or online shopping experiences and social media channels.
If you look at your brand’s offerings, an internal audit can show if you are truly delivering what your customers are looking for in their products and services for their pet. For example, industry trends show that pet parents are now looking for more eco-friendly products and are focusing more on healthy and natural ingredients in their pets’ foods. It’s important to make sure that as customers’ demands change, we are adjusting our brand’s products and services to meet them so that the brand stays relevant in the industry.
If the products are the issue, it may be beneficial to make changes to your supply chain, production methods, or ingredient sourcing. Quality control should be a priority to stay true to our brand’s promise to its customers and their expectations of our brand.
Now that we have looked at the issues that may arise, we can see that a problem of not enough customers is easier to solve than if the problem is our brand’s offerings. No matter what the problem is, the key to revitalizing a brand in the pet industry is first diagnosing the problem. After identifying the issue, we can better target strategies and address the specific challenges our brand faces. By aiming your efforts at the root cause of your brand’s challenges, you will see better performance going forward and be able to revitalize your brand in the eyes of its customers.
Did you enjoy this post? Read about “Mastering Brand Architecture: What MARS Teaches Us About Strategic Brand Management” in my last post!”
