How Chewy is taking on Amazon with Clever Brand Positioning, Customer Service, and Emotive Advertising

Chewy are a masterclass in building a retail brand through positioning, advertising and customer service

Who will love this

• Connoisseurs of exceptional customer service

• Anyone who’s ever been disappointed by Amazon’s customer service

• Marketers who are also pet parents

Today

G’day,

Today I’m writing about Chewy, a brand that recently became very relevant to me as a new pet parent 🥰

Chewy have been on my radar for a while. They’re a stellar example of a retailer that’s built an incredibly strong brand despite the fact that they’re selling other people’s products. I think this brand answers the question: how can you differentiate yourself as a retailer when people can get the same products you offer, elsewhere?

Chewy nails understand their audience: pet lovers. They understand that pets are a part of the family, that Amazon is the standard for e-commerce expectations, and that shoppers are in a moment when people are incredibly frustrated with customer service.

Chewy has:

• Claimed the #1 position for online pet retail (Source: Morgan Stanley)

• Held its own against Amazon in the cutthroat e-commerce category

• Made the best US pet supplies ad of the last 3 years

• Gone viral for * check notess * customer service!?

Not bad.

Let’s dig into how they did it 🐶

Amanda

How Chewy Have Built the #1 Retail Brand for Pet Parents with Powerful Positioning, Advertising and Customer Service

Business Strategy 💸

Chewy is a retail business. Like many retail businesses, they have several private label brands including dog food (Tylee’s), wellness (Vibeful), cat food and treats (Tiny Tiger), and flea and tick protection (Onguard Plus). Autoship makes up over 77% of net sales for Chewy. They’ve also introduced CarePlus, a pet insurance and wellness plan, marking the business’s entry into the health insurance sector for pets, as well as Chewy Vet Care.

What’s interesting to me is how successful Chewy have been in an absolutely cutthroat category. Going up against Amazon is no mean feat. So it’s unsurprising that Chewy’s founder & first CEO, Ryan Cohen, cites Amazon’s 1997 letter to shareholders as a roadmap for how to grow Chewy. Here’s what Ryan had to say about it in 2019:

“I thought if I could deliver the same kind of personalized experience as the neighborhood pet store, but do it online and deliver a really convenient value proposition, that we could build a really big business.”

Brand Strategy 🎯

What’s interesting to me about Chewy is that it isn’t the first pet e-commerce company. Remember Pets.com from the early 2000s? You probably remember their sock puppet mascot. I know I do! But they didn’t last. At the time people didn’t see the point of ordering pet supplies online. Chewy came along in 2011, when people were comfier with online shopping. They flipped a negative experience - waiting for your shipment to arrive - into an entertaining idea: pets waiting at the door for their shipments.

• Positioning: Where pet lovers shop. Chewy quickly carved out a positioning against two very different competitors - Amazon, and your local pet store. The e-commerce space is cutthroat: the top four players control more than 50% of market share. Amazon alone controls more than 40%. Chewy positions themselves against the big dogs by owning the customer experience and positioning themselves as the pet store for pet lovers. If you love your pets, you’ll shop at Chewy. Powerful stuff, and a good dose of parenting guilt heaped in there. And it’s working!

• Verbal identity. Chewy’s verbal identity shows up consistently across their advertising, social media, and customer service. It’s a small thing, but consistency builds trust, and Chewy’s consistent while also flexing to suit the different channels they show up on. I love their TikTok bio.

• Customer service. Customer service as a brand expression is super cool. Any organization that can coordinate customer service and live out their values in creative, surprising ways is evidence that the entire organization understands their brand (and is empowered to use it). Chewy’s customer service is legendary because they understand pet parents.

• Advertising. Chewy’s ads are excellent. That’s not just an opinion - System1, who measure the effectiveness of advertisements, reported that this ad was the best US pet supplies ad of the last three years. Chewy really is a marketer’s dream: an innovative product (Autoship) + a passionate audience - and they’ve knocked it out of the park with strong creative strategy and ad production, too.

Brand Marketing Moves 💃

• Surprise Pet Portraits. Chewy’s been doing these for years, so the ROI on them must be incredible. Chewy randomly commissions portraits of customer’s pets, which inevitably wind up on the internet, generating all kinds of great PR for Chewy. I love it!

• Donations & random acts of kindness. Chewy knows how to tug at the heartstrings. Chewy advises pet parents whose pets have unexpectedly passed away to donate their unused pet supplies to local shelters in lieu of returning the products (and refunds their purchase, too). I mean, honestly, this is a masterclass in customer service.

• Chewy Claus. Chewy invited pets to ‘write’ to Chewy Claus requesting treats and toys, and fulfilled pet wishes or made donations on the pet’s behalf to animal shelters.

@chronicallyannoyed

@chewy #Chewy #ChewyClaus #Christmas #Wishlist #MyDogsWishlist #Unboxing #Holidays Thank you so much Chewy for sending Renzo some amazing... See more

What can we learn from Chewy?

• Know your competition. Chewy took a strategic bet that the big e-commerce retailers wouldn’t follow them and investing in a better customer experience. I mean, could you see Amazon employees painting portraits of cats? Know what your competition won’t do, and and play the heck out of your own position.

• Do things that don’t scale. Commissioning artists to paint portraits of cats doesn’t sound like a line item that would make sense to generate eyeballs or dollars. But if you understand pet lovers, which Chewy does, doing the things that don’t scale is exactly how you build a brand.

• Match your audiences energy with tone of voice. One of the things I love about Chewy’s customer service is that they match the energy of their audience. By comparison, customer service emails from Amazon feel robotic and cold.

That’s all, this week!

Amanda ✌️🐶

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