Applying Human Health Trends to Pet Health Creates Healthy Opportunities

We talk to them like they’re human. They often sleep in our beds. Sometimes, we buy them custom-made Minnesota Vikings jerseys with the name “Puddles” on the back. The humanization of pets isn’t a trend; it’s a reality. Which is why it’s realistic to believe that trends in human health make an impact on the pet health industry.

According to a 2015 Harris poll, 95 percent of pet owners consider their pets to be part of the family. That’s a lot of people treating pets like people. And that means lots of opportunities to take advantage of a new reality.

It’s already happening

Applying human trends to the pet health sector isn’t brand-new thinking; forward-looking pet health companies have been barking up this tree for a while now.

• Wearables and apps made to track human health have been translated to pets.
• Taking a cue from the zillion-dollar health insurance industry, many employers and plans are offering health insurance for pets.
• Though in its infancy, telemedicine is a growing industry all by itself when it comes to pet parent/veterinarian relations.
• Subscriptions services for humans (LootCrate, Trunk Club, etc.) have made their way into the pet world.
• At-home health monitoring of pets, most notably diabetes management, is more and more prevalent.

How to learn from these examples

What these products and services have in common is that they capitalize on a way of thinking that hasn’t been applied to pets before, and they were applied relatively quickly. For example, pet fitness trackers. That FitBit that adorns seemingly every wrist in the known universe? Believe it or not, the $4 billion FitBit company first made the product available to the public in 2009. And here we are seven years later with multiple versions of the same technology built exclusively for our dogs. Imagine telling yourself five years ago that you’d be able to buy a collar for your dog that would tell you what kind of day he was having. You’d laugh yourself off your Segway. In any industry, the reason for a product’s success can without a doubt be traced back to an unmet need. Fill that need and you have a hit. The same applies to taking a tactic that has worked in one arena and applying it to another, like going from the human to pet realm.

Pet owners are a growing audience, and that audience cares for their pets like never before. But the largest (and growing larger) segment of this audience, millennials, are also hardcharging, career-oriented individuals who are either hip-deep in the working world or school. They don’t have a lot of free time, which is why telemedicine for their pets is an appealing proposition. With smartphones and touch screens hardwired into their brains, it makes sense that online medical communications is a huge hole that could be filled. If you can take care of your pet’s health without loading him into the car, why wouldn’t you?

See the hole. Fill the hole.

The same idea can be applied to nearly every situation and any brand, product or service. See the hole; fill the hole. Of course, predicting the future and spotting the holes is easier said than done.

So how do you spot these opportunities? Partner with someone who specializes in seeing into the future. With technology developing at the speed of light and preferred communication channels fluctuating seemingly every day, sometimes you need an outside voice who can cut through the noise to provide guidance and clarity. Imagine being the company who saw the trend in personal health monitoring coming; the company that can read where an audience is going is the company that rolls out the FitBit. The company that sees those same people wanting to do the same for their pets is getting in on the ground floor of another movement. The most important key to successful innovation in any industry is to look outside your comfort zone and see what’s working. A marketing agency with a vast portfolio of clients and industries can take unique perspective from one industry and easily think about applications in another. For instance, if we create an app that evaluates a farmer’s unique setup and tells what can be improved on the operation, could that same technology be applied to non-ag situations? Could it be applied to a veterinarian’s office?

Luckily, when it comes to human trends in pet care, we at least have somewhere to start. If it works for people, would it work for pets? As a marketing agency, we’ve found that if a product or service exploded onto the scene with great and/or quick success, there will be imitators without question. We try to take that a step further and cross industries, helping clients turn imitation into innovation.

Watch. Listen. Learn. Apply.

As with every industry, two-way communication is key. The best way to figure out what human trends might apply to your pet products or services is to listen to your audience and potential audience. Is there a need they’re chattering about? Interact and find out more. Then you can review the landscape and see that “outside of your comfort zone” trends can apply TO your comfort zone and meet your audience needs.

Woodruff Sweitzer specializes in more than one industry, so we’re perfectly positioned to help you put these tactics into motion. We’ve shown plenty of examples of ways human health trends have applied to the pet arena, so it’s not a long leap to say in-depth knowledge of human healthcare can be a boon to pet health companies looking to branch out.

Having the resources on hand to monitor the communications streams is incredibly underrated. A partner who understands not only your market but the communication applications within your market can be that valuable resource. You can’t be an expert on everything, but turning to those who are is often an overlooked maneuver. Let Woodruff Sweitzer help you sift through the noise, come to conclusions that make sense, and then implement those solutions in a way that will help you stand out from the crowd. After all, when you take the first smartphone for dogs to market, you want people to know about it.