Royal Canin is a division of Mars Petcare, and a leading brand focused on Pet nutrition.

Profound were engaged to help Royal Canin explore Consumer behaviours and to identify opportunities to improve the Customer Experience, proposition, and delivery as part of their Loyalty and Advocacy programme .

In today’s complex market and customer environment creating loyalty and brand advocacy is a core focus, continuingly needing to adapt to changes in market dynamics and customer behaviour. Consumers interact in different ways, increasingly their journeys and experiences are taking place in complex customer journey ecosystems that span different markets, channels, environments and channel partners organisations. In Royal Canin’s environment consumers Interact with Retail, Online, Vets and Breeder channels, and the engagement Journey can be different based on the life stage of their pet.

Royal Canin were looking for improvements to consumer engagement that would drive loyalty and advocacy. Our focus was to develop a robust understanding of Consumer perceptions of Pet Loyalty programmes and map the channel ecosystems, the Customer Journey and consumer interactions within them. Ultimately the business was seeking to improve Customer Experience, achieve deeper engagement with Consumers, and improve the Loyalty scheme.

Our work was led by our Experience design and innovation team and covered Customer Experience Design, Customer Journey Mapping, Data and Insights and Customer Research.

Initially, we examined the Internal stakeholder perceptions on building advocacy and the role of the Loyalty programme and define a set of outcomes for the Future state proposition and what it would deliver for both the business and the consumer. We then developed a statement of intent to create the north star that would guide future Experience design activities in a consistent way to reflect the brand and the Loyalty model the business wanted to create.

We used the existing persona definitions and elaborated them to provide a deeper understanding of consumer behavioural motivations. We then mapped out the current state loyalty customer journey, identifying pain points for customers and for the business, understanding the critical moments of truth for consumers, and looking at specific areas of improvement or opportunity. We also defined underlying data and technology enablers that were supporting the current approach, highlighting dependencies and challenges that would need to be overcome. We looked at the Customer Journey across the lifecycle identifying challenges and drop-offs in their engagement with the brand and what was impacting the current Loyalty and rewards scheme.

Building on the understanding of the personas and customer journey, we undertook some consumer research which leveraged existing data and insights but also conducted interviews with consumers to understand their perceptions, motivations, behaviours, and preferences. Specifically, we focussed on their engagement with rewards schemes and people’s motivations for making decisions about a particular pet food provider. We examined how people look for information and how they engage online (and offline) and what consumers value from a reward and membership scheme.

Based on the insights from the customer journey and the consumer research we helped the Royal Canin team consider the Future state Journey and identify areas of opportunity. We defined potential solutions both in terms of the proposition, customer experience, improving engagement, and the data and technology platform required to enable it. We prioritised the solution areas with the business to look at those that had the biggest positive impact on consumers and then also evaluated what could be achieved as immediate tactical solution ideas to address immediate pains (for the business and for customers) as well as the medium to longer-term solutions. As a result, this provided some pragmatic shorter-term actions as well as bigger plans for the future Loyalty and Advocacy model and informed their roadmap for delivery.