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BRANDED
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market include Nestle’s Purina brand, a growing pack of private-
label rivals — retailers Aldi, Dunnes, Lidl, SuperValu and Tesco all
have their own dog-food lines — and expensive speciality brands
such as Burns and Eukanuba.
These feisty competitors are looking to do more than nip at
Pedigree’s heels; they want to take a big bite out of its business.
To protect its market share, the brand invests heavily in
a multi-strand communications programme that includes
advertising (TV, radio, outdoor and internet), PR and sponsorship.
The brand’s advertising budget alone runs to more than €1m
a year.
Not a hair out of place
Like many of the dogs it feeds, the Pedigree brand is groomed to
perfection. Anything to do with the brand — from advertising to
product packaging — must be in keeping with its guiding mantra,
‘everything we do is for the love of dogs’.
The Pedigree brand was first introduced in the UK and Ireland in
the Fifties. Originally called Pedigree Chum, the name was short-
ened to Pedigree in the early Nineties as part of a global brand har-
monisation drive that also saw the Marathon bar being supplanted
by Snickers.
Early advertisements for the Pedigree brand focused on the
quality and nutritional value of the product with slogans such as
‘What Champions Are Made Of’. This quality angle was further
underlined when Pedigree began its lengthy association with Crufts
Dog Show in 1964 and the long-running slogan, ‘Top Breeders
Recommend It’ was introduced.
In recent years, this has been replaced by a new slogan ‘We’re
for Dogs’ as part of a global repositioning of the brand, which has
focused more on making an emotional connection with the dog
owner than merely extolling the virtues of the product itself.
“We used to position Pedigree as the dog expert but then we
said, ‘Hang on, the person who knows a dog best is not Pedigree
or anyone else, it’s the dog’s owner’. All we do is help bring the dog
and the owner even closer, enhance the relationship they already
have,” explains Looney.
May/June ‘08 Marketing Age 37
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