Giving pet parents good food made easy
What We Did
- Strategy
- Naming
- Design
Challenge
With the Targets, Whole Foods, Safeways and Walmarts of the world becoming masters at home-grown private label brands, pet specialty was lagging behind. And in the highly competitive retail market, Petco wanted to further differentiate itself against the growing number of specialty pet chains and e-commerce competitors. They had identified the opportunity to develop their own new-to-world better-for-pets natural line of food products and then asked Bulldog Drummond to help build the new brand.
Result
Together, we built a connected and compelling brand platform that resonates both internally and with customers alike. Beautiful, bold design that features real stories of pets and their pet parents helps the brand stand out on crowded shelves. WholeHearted is a brand that delivers the goodness needed for more joyful moments between pets and their owners (and equally significant business results). We’ve partnered with the WholeHearted team to extend the brand across dynamic and relevant new offerings and continue to help shepherd the brand as it takes on a larger presence in-store.
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“Bulldog helped us push outside our comfort zone, challenging Petco and the pet food space. Together, we created a brand that we’re incredibly proud of, with a strong backbone and exceptionally creative product design. Their team dedicated themselves to helping us build WholeHearted, which has eclipsed forecast and budget!”
—Nick Konat, SVP
Serious brand adoption, love and loyalty by consumers, as such the brand has been extended into a nutrition platform for Petco. Brand performance has significantly exceeded financial expectations.
Healthy Benefits
Our first brand extension was the WholeHearted Healthy Benefits line—food designed to help manage and mitigate some of the most common health challenges facing pets. For this line, we pulled in semiotics from the human health space, adding more white and a clear demarcation for the actual benefit of each product. The result was a new line that delivered clearly and coherently within the system while growing the overall WholeHearted offering in-store.
Small Breed
Small Breed was our next extension in the portfolio. To differentiate this line, we focused on the emotional connection that’s so near and dear to pet parents of small breed pets. We brought a big heart to the forefront of the package to communicate that intense love and added additional illustration elements throughout the pack to communicate a corresponding sense of fun and joy. The result was a new line that was connected to the overall WholeHearted promise but did so in a way that Small Breed pet parents knew was just for them.
Limited Ingredient
Our latest brand extension was a premium offering based around best-in-class limited ingredients. For these designs, we brought in a foil to communicate the unique offering and put more emphasis on the key limited ingredient through size, placement and photography. The result was a clearly differentiated new offering that allowed WholeHearted to go head to head with the growing number of premium limited ingredient offerings.
