Primal Pet Foods had a growth problem hiding in plain sight: pet parents already care deeply, but many still feed diets they don’t fully trust.
To understand the emotional and behavioral barriers, we fielded first-party research with 500 pet parents. The findings revealed a powerful tension:
So the objective wasn’t just awareness. It was conversion with conviction: move premium kibble feeders from “I care” to “I’m choosing better.”
This campaign launched Primal’s innovation, Kibble in the Raw, and—critically—introduced a new brand platform we developed to unify Primal’s story: More Time in Their Prime. The goal was to reframe raw not as extreme or inconvenient, but as the most natural path to helping pets feel better, longer, without asking pet parents to become experts or take on raw’s perceived hassle.
Success meant changing how people feel about feeding, and giving them a simple, believable reason to switch: raw nutrition made easy, in service of more healthy years together.
The human truth
Pet parents don’t experience feeding as a task. They experience it as love—with stakes. Our research showed they’re emotionally invested, but uneasy about what “normal” pet food really delivers. That gap between love and confidence created the opening.
The strategic moves
We built the strategy around communicating two core beliefs:
To get there, we leaned on behavioral science:
The Idea: Make instinct visible
The modern pet food industry is built around human logic applied to animals: ingredients, trends, and processing designed for human preferences.
We flipped the perspective.
The campaign asked: What is your pet really thinking about?
By reimagining everyday home moments through a pet’s instinctual lens, we revealed the wild still living under the surface. Living rooms became wilderness. Backyards became hunting grounds. Ordinary routines showed ancestral wiring.
That creative approach did two jobs at once:
The product’s role: the bridge
Kibble in the Raw was positioned as the breakthrough that removes the biggest barrier: inconvenience.
Raw nutrition, made easy. A modern format that still honors what pets are built to eat.
What we implemented
Net: we didn’t ask pet parents to learn raw. We helped them recognize raw—then gave them the easiest way to act on it.
In a category full of claims and confusion, the campaign helped Primal take a simple, unmistakable stand: pets thrive on the diet they were built for—and that’s how you get more time in their prime.
The work successfully supported the launch of Kibble in the Raw, helping to drive double-digit share growth, and contributed to incremental sales growth across Primal’s primary digital channels, including DTC, Amazon, and Chewy. By making raw nutrition feel obvious and biologically aligned—rather than extreme—the campaign moved premium kibble feeders closer to the behaviors that matter most: trial, repeat, and switching consideration.
Beyond performance, the campaign delivered the strategic win: it elevated Primal from “another premium option” to a brand with a point of view rooted in instinct and biology, not trends. It introduced and established More Time in Their Prime as a durable brand idea—one that connects product benefits to what pet parents actually want: more good years with the animal they love.
