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What Your Dog Knows About Marketing
People don’t want what you sell; they want how your product makes them feel
Dog food must be getting better. More nutritious and, of course, delicious.
Americans spent more than $24 billion on dog food last year. The average price has skyrocketed, and so has the gourmet nature of ingredients, like sweet potatoes, elk, and free-range bison.
And yet, I’ve never seen a dog buy dog food. Have you?
Dog food might be getting more delicious as it gets more expensive, but we actually have no idea. We have no clue whether dogs enjoy it more, because we’re not dogs.
But we can be sure that dog owners like it more.
Because dog food is for dog owners. It’s for the way it makes them feel, the satisfaction of taking care of an animal that responds with loyalty and affection, the status of buying a luxury good, and the generosity of sharing it.
Some dog owners want to spend more on the dog food they buy. Some want gluten-free dog food, loaded with high-value placebos.
But let’s not get confused about who all this innovation is for. It’s not for the dogs.
It’s for us.
A marketer for a dog food company might decide that the secret of more dog food sales is to make a food that tastes better. But that requires understanding how a dog thinks, which is awfully difficult.
It turns out that the right formula is to make a dog food that dog owners want to buy.
The purpose of this example isn’t to help market dog food better. It’s to understand that there’s almost always a disconnect between performance and appeal. That the best price/performance combination is rarely the market’s choice.
There are two voices in our heads. There’s the dog’s voice, the one that doesn’t have many words but knows what it wants. And there’s the owner’s voice, which is nuanced, contradictory, and complex. It is juggling countless inputs and is easily distracted.
Like the dog owner who is choosing based on 100 factors (but not taste), the people that marketers seek to serve care about a range of inputs and emotions, not simply a…
