Our objective was to break new ground for Chewy, authentically connect with a new generation of pet parents and drive brand affinity and engagement by launching our very first TikTok activation. For National Dog Day - and in a celebration of all pets - we introduced our digital-first #ChewyChattyPets campaign with a TikTok Hashtag Challenge asking pet parents to bring their pets’ most entertaining inner monologues to life. The campaign builds on the channel trend of sharing quirky and relatable pet moments (PetTok).
Our goals included:
Ignite brand familiarity within new pet parent audiences (e.g., Gen Z) and drive follower growth on TikTok as emerging Chewy channel.
Develop high-value audiences and serve as an additional touchpoint for already-engaged pet parents.
Partner with and deploy genuine Creator partnerships to tell the Chewy brand value story.
Win in Share of Voice during a key pet-centric holiday (National Dog Day) by taking over trending content lists and in-feed experiences.
We identified a white space through research and insights that pet parents love to personify their pets. To kick off the campaign, we partnered with five official TikTok Creators and provided a Chewy-original audio track to ignite the challenge with pet parents everywhere.
We know that TikTok – although an emerging platform – is highly-utilized and viewed by our target audiences (Millennials & Gen Z) who are looking for genuine connection points with other users and brands. In the era of “silence, brand” and being turned off by overtly promotional ads, we knew we needed to approach an inaugural Hashtag Challenge with our authentic Chewy voice, all while capturing active pet parents in a space they already exist – and on a holiday that exists outside the space, National Dog Day.
In less than 24 hours, we garnered 578+ user submissions (amassing 695M+ video views), which quickly affirmed our hypothesis that PetTok is a space that is genuine and true to Chewy’s core business values. We saw a benchmark-breaking engagement rate across content - and increased our followers by +10% month-over-month after the Challenge flighted.
We also saw a staggering 1.8B+ impressions on the branded #ChewyChattyPets hashtag during the 3-day campaign (+12.5% increase vs. TikTok’s 1.6B benchmark for Hashtag Challenges). This was driven by content stemming from Creator partners (5.6M+ video views), which have now led to ongoing partnership moments & conversations beyond National Dog Day.
Beyond exceeding TikTok benchmarks for the Challenge, we saw overwhelmingly positive Brand Lift Study results (powered by Kantar) within Familiarity, Purchase Intent, Ad Recall, and Awareness. We saw a significant lift in Purchase Intent in particular, signaling to us that future campaigns & TikTok Challenges should integrate product assortments.
