Fancy Feast New Platform Development

Nestlé-Purina’s Fancy Feast cat food brand looked to us to help them continue the brand’s phenomenal success story by identifying new product platforms that would deliver incremental sales and profits. Our first task was to get to know the brand’s unique customer segment in a way that illuminated the true nature of their relationship with their cat.

We deployed both in-person at home and consumer-generated video ethnography research to capture the nuances of their relationship in a way that revealed a new understanding of these consumers. While the typical industry characterization of the owner-cat relationship was one of parent-child, we learned that this segment’s relationship was more of a cherished friend who emotionally supports the owner. With this insight, we developed an innovation strategy to redefine the pet feeding occasion as mirroring human eating occasions. From there, we led the Fancy Feast team in focused new product ideation which generated a number of human eating occasion analogs, including Fancy Feast Broths.

The launch of this new product platform has been a phenomenal and enduring success, where Nestlé-Purina has been able to create a new sub-category with little to no competition.