Putting a spring in the step of Burgess dog food

The UK has seen a huge rise in dog ownership, with many owners unsure as to what food to feed their dogs, which will give them everything they need. Insight revealed that current dog owners see their pet as a human (a ‘fur baby’), part of the family and genuinely care about what their pet is consuming.

We identified a growth audience within this increased dog owner market and profiled those that are interested in the health of their pet, as our targets. After identifying our category convention and discovering our opportunity within this fast growing sector, we then set about developing creative territories, a strategy and brand model.

We focussed on creating an identity that could be easily understood and remembered, and would fill the canvas (in our case, the top of a pack) to ensure stand out on listing sites and in-store. Our final word marque gives a friendly feel, with its soft edges and the slight customisation means that the Burgess logo really feels like a part of the product brand, not just a sign-off.

Our brand essence of 'Food that puts a spring in your dogs step' led us to the strapline; 'A Healthy Tummy Means a Happier Dog', addressing the insight that our health conscious dog owner audience really cares about what they are feeding their loved ones. Furthermore, hinting at the fact that if their dogs could talk, they would tell them that they wanted Burgess Sensitive! Our brand roundel features the strapline around a custom paw print/heart graphic, again a light nod to the love our owners have for their dogs, and how they show it by feeding them Sensitive food.

The portfolio of packaging designs are all focussed around illustrations of dogs — and not just any dogs, but the dogs owned by the Burgess team. We created a set of custom illustrations from supplied reference material, ensuring we got across the dogs personality wherever we could. Each dog has its own story and is the hero on one of the five packs in the Sensitive range.

We created a style for the packaging that put the brand name, the product type and more importantly, the dog, front and centre. Each product variant has its own colour, with all other elements consistently placed using the same styling - to ensure that customers could recognise products across the range.

We created a launch campaign for the newly packaged products that again majored on the fact that if your dog could talk, it would tell you it wanted Burgess Sensitive. This led us to actually making the dogs talk, putting them as the star of the show in our 'Dear Burgess' campaign, enabling them to come to life, talking to Burgess and explaining the health issues they were having. Our campaign helped to make the serious issue of your dogs stomach health fun, and also allowed Burgess to talk back to the dogs, explaining which products were best for them.