Connecting, Not Promoting, Is Furlocity’s Pet Project
“Anybody who doesn’t approach marketing from a lifestyle perspective, who only approaches it as a problem-solver, is making a huge mistake,” said Furlocity marketing director Matthew Holden.
In a country where more than half the population owns pets, it’s not surprising that pet services make up a $62 billion industry. But what is surprising is that “the industry sort of stumbled into that figure,” said Matthew Holden, marketing director of Furlocity, a site for helping pet owners find pet hotels and boarding facilities and other services. “From a digital marketing perspective, it hasn’t been particularly disciplined and hasn’t built a real digital platform to sell services.” Furlocity intends to provide that platform.
But Holden believes that just selling services isn’t enough to connect with and retain today’s customers. “Anybody who doesn’t approach marketing from a lifestyle perspective, who only approaches it as a problem-solver, is making a huge mistake,” he said.
To that end, Holden makes sure his team participates in the pet-owning community. “A lot of our day isn’t necessarily putting together copy or creating new ads or in any way promoting our product,” he said. “What I have to do every day, more than any other marketing position I’ve ever been in, is to make sure I’m there in the space, communicating not as a member of Furlocity, but just talking to people about what their lifestyle is like.”
Not that the rest of the C-suite wouldn’t like to see more tangible results. “The fight is always, how much of it is branded?” Holden said. “That is the struggle that marketers are having right now—the unquantifiable amount of effort into an unquantifiable amount of results.”
Highlights from this week’s Marketing Superstars podcast include:
- How changes in the nature of pet ownership have created a huge industry with little coordinated marketing (2:25)
- Keeping track of trends and customer sentiment in an emotional space (6:50)
- The need to do sentiment analysis despite having tons of data (9:03)
- Providing a solution should be the beginning of the relationship, not the end (15:03)
- How to start thinking about marketing to a lifestyle rather than a product (17:34)
- What kind of content to share in order to build brand (21:18)
Click here to listen to previous episodes of Marketing Superstars.