This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

The marketing of dog food
Dog food must be getting better. More nutritious and of course, delicious.
Americans spent more than twenty-four billion dollars 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 you market dog food better. It’s
to understand that there’s almost always a disconnect between performance
and appeal. That the engineer’s choice of 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’s juggling countless
inputs and is easily distracted.
Like the dog owner who is choosing based on a hundred factors (but not
taste), the people you seek to serve care about a range of inputs and
emotions, not simply a contest for who’s the cheapest.
Choose your extremes and you choose your market. And vice versa.