How-To Build a Pet Brand

… Guts.

Brands have courage. Brand builders are daring, rebellious folk, who believe deeply in something bigger than themselves and their business, and find growth and satisfaction by making selling less important than helping.

What Makes a Great Brand?

To most people, whether they admit it or not, a brand is a desirable thing. A somewhat mystical, magical, delectable thing. A brand creates trust, stirs-up our emotions and reinforces things we want to believe about ourselves. Brands make us feel good: they save us time in our decision-making and in some cases they add little injections of joy to daily lives.

A great pet brand is no exception.

The only difference between a great brand and a great pet brand, is that it taps in to the love, compassion, cares and fears we associate with our beloved creatures.

Pet brands are cheating.

It’s almost too easy for a dog brand or cat brand to establish itself in the hearts of its customers. I mean, it’s pretty unfair to all those bank, tire and detergent brands that have to work so hard to get us to notice, let alone care about their product or message.

But us pet brands, all we have to do is wield a cute puppy photo or hilarious cat meme and we’re in! We’ve broken down the walls and our person is now ripe for connecting with us and our brand.

Build a business, or a brand?

The catch of course, is that brands don’t build themselves. They don’t happen by accident. Brands are carefully constructed structures built on values, conversations, aesthetics – a whole series of decisions that a brand builder must make and then own, consistently.

Are you building a business or a brand? How can you tell?

Ask yourself these key questions:

Do I know why I do what I do
Do I know exactly who I do it for, and who their pet is
Do I sell what my who wants and is willing to pay for
Do I communicate my why expertly & irresistibly on all platforms
Have I made it easy for my who to say yes to me by delivering clear value & limited choices
Have I mastered surprise & delight, so my who buys again and again and tells their friends all about me

Yes? No?

How’d you do? Did you answer yes to all of these questions? Congrats you’re an expert-level brand owner! Did you answer no to one or more of these questions? Well, worry not, you’re in the right place.

The Six Questions are just the beginning…

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“We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” –Aristotle

If excellence is a habit, than so is being a brand. It’s not any one thing you say, do, sell or package beautifully. A brand is the sum of choices a business makes and then acts on about how they are going to show up.

How are you going to show up?

You can show up as a business: Selling. Worrying. Always focused on yourself and what you can get out of any given conversation, situation or partnership…

Or you can show up as a brand: As a human. Helping. Confident. Always focused on your customers and partners and what you can give or share that will add value, knowing it will come back to benefit you.

Wanna borrow some confidence?

If you’re not feeling brave or rebellious – don’t worry. We are trained our whole life to fit in, it’s not going to be easy to fight your urge to get in line… but it begins today. Now that you have us to lean on you can start to shrug off that boring ol’ vanilla business and start building your kick ass brand!

What we do here at Working with Dog is help petpreneurs like you, build brands. Why? To cash in on those waiting lists of clients, the extra profit you can claim by being in demand, all the media buzz that follows the hottest new thing (that’s you), and most of all, defining and supporting whatever your version of freedom is.

I’m not interested in helping you crush yourself under the weight of a business you can’t manage that isn’t paying you back… But I AM interested in helping you set real boundaries and cash big checks.

My team and I are super experienced, 100% focused and I’m not afraid to say, pretty damn smug about the results we get for our clients, partners and members. It’s what we feed off of. That’s why we built this thing… to feel good about helping you find your zone of genius and profit from it.