28 | Our. Guide to Pet Branding

Pets aren’t just pets. They’ve got stockings at Christmas, personalised feeding bowls – they’re a part of the family.

It’s no surprise that the pet category has jumped on the opportunity, going way beyond paw prints on packs. Pet branding should be warm, playful and emotional while also staying commercially sharp.

Trust is as important as it is in brands for humans, especially around nutrition, wellbeing and safety. Ultimately, branding has to work harder to resonate with real pet people, stand out in crowded retail space and hold its own online.

From repositioning household names like Webbox to launching challenger campaigns like Felight and creating specialist ranges like Just 6, we’ve helped pet brands earn trust and cut through. So, if you’re wondering why you should listen to us, it's because Our approach to pet branding has been tried and tested, and is backed by a deep understanding of retail reality.

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What makes a great pet brand?

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Emotional connection drives purchase

Pet purchasing decisions are probably more emotional than rational. When someone picks up a treat, a supplement, or a bag of food, they’re making a decision on behalf of their furry loved one. That means branding must reflect care, reassurance and empathy without becoming sickly sweet or patronising.

Great pet branding taps into that bond and understands the psychology of pet parents, reflecting how they see their animals not as pets, but as personalities. There’s also nuance between different species, and even breeds. Where dog owners are more focussed on nutrition and health benefits, cat owners favour products that communicate taste and cater to fussy felines.

Personality + credibility = trust

It’s easy to lean into playful design in the pet category. It’s harder to balance personality with credibility, especially in food, supplements and wellbeing.

Tone of voice, photography, illustration and information hierarchy must work together. Things like ingredient clarity, species navigation and life-stage cues need to be immediately obvious. If a customer can’t tell dog from cat at a glance, you’ve already lost them.

Shelf impact in a colour-coded aisle

The pet aisle is one of the most visually segmented spaces in retail. Colour does a lot of the heavy lifting; blue dominates litter, green signals “natural”, black cues premium. As a result, standing out requires more than shouting louder.

It’s about strategic differentiation, understanding what’s already there and deciding whether to disrupt it or own a space within it.

Built to scale

Pet brands rarely live as single categories. They expand into treats, supplements, wet, dry, fresh, seasonal, eco variants and more.

A great pet brand is built to flex across formats and sub-categories without losing clarity. It works just as confidently on shelf as it does on Amazon thumbnails or social campaigns, and that’s where a solid strategy wins every time.

How we approach Pet Branding

Strategy first

Every pet project begins with research and clarity. Who is the brand for? What emotional territory does it own? What does the competitive set look like? Where are the white spaces?

For Webbox, this meant redefining the brand around a simple, powerful idea: “Fuelled by fun, run on love, driven by pets.”

This positioning became the foundation for everything, from brand identity, tone of voice and packaging designs to photography and activation. Strategy leads and commercially smart design decisions follow.

Category insight + creativity

We combine decades of FMCG experience with pet-specific understanding, and Felight offers a great example of how we do it.

The cat litter category is dominated by blue, so we deliberately drove shoppers to the pink side. The campaign leaned into feline attitude and cats on the throne (literally), with throne-themed assets and just the right amount of sass.

Obviously the approach was attention-grabbing, but underneath the humour was clear product communication, structured hierarchy and scalable assets. We gave the in-house team a brand toolkit that worked across packs, social, digital and in-store, as well as assets designed to unlock listings and shift perception.

More recently over in the world of dogs, we designed the tags for Pets at Home’s toy range. The original design looked dated compared to the new parent brand, but the biggest challenge was injecting some fun into it while maintaining clear claims on the small tags.

The aim was to cement Pets at Home as pet experts vs other Amazon/supermarket competition. What we created included consistent architecture for claims placement (non-latex, no squeak), typography to match toy personality (tugging, snuggling, pouncing), and a clear colour hierarchy consistent with the wider brand.

Maximising that limited design area with graphics that really pack a punch will make a big difference to shoppers in-store and online.

Premium, without alienation

For Just 6, the brief was to create a cleaner, simpler dog food sub-brand without alienating Harringtons’ loyal core audience. At the time, people were just starting to become more aware of additives and ingredients - even in natural products - so we tapped into that human trend and applied it to dog food.

We built the proposition around six recognisable ingredients. Sleek black packaging signalled premium and ingredient imagery reinforced transparency. The design was also clear and colour-coded to simplify navigation.

The fact that this brand is still on shelves years later, largely untouched, is proof that strategic pet branding has longevity.

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Planning your next Pet Brand move?

Whether you're launching a new pet food range, refreshing an existing brand, or new product development, we’d love to talk.

The first step is a simple conversation. We’ll ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and help you understand what your brand actually needs, whether that’s strategy, identity, development, or all three.

Planning a new pet brand or refreshing an existing one? Get in touch with OurCreative. and let’s build something pet people will truly love.

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