In 2023, Sheba had just 5% of the American wet cat food market. Even as a challenger brand, it had been steadily losing brand consideration.

Then a lockdown-induced kitten buying boom created an opportunity to change things, to grow the brand by entering the wet kitten food market for the very first time.

But this category was tough to crack. Even with the boom the market has only grown by 0.2%.

To win, we’d need to:

Reach pet parents at scale

Get the brand and product seen as many times as possible

Get them to buy Sheba

Sell $13.5 million worth of kitten food in 2023

Do it by stealing from competitors

Particularly our biggest competitor, Fancy Feast

And get people to consider Sheba for their adult cat as a result

Reverse the decline in total brand consideration and grow brand household penetration

This one epic data point drove everything we did, from the idea to the art direction, the media and the music. It didn’t fuel the story, it was the story.

Set to an Elvis Presley style love song that featured the lyrics ‘love is tender, love is cruel’, our short form films celebrated the deep love between allergic owners and their Sheba-seeking kittens, calling out the 1 in 4 statistic directly.

The campaign ran across more than 100 out-of-home screens purposefully placed next to large pharmacies in New York City, offering 2000 Sheba discounts via QR codes to owners heading in for their antihistamines.

We even sent starter packs to kitten owning micro-influencers. Comprising a free pack, kitten blanket and branded tissues, giving them a way to wipe those watery eyes.

To break the functional mould of the category and connect with pet parents on an emotional level, we wanted to celebrate the power kittens held in their paws. The question was, how far would kitten parents go?

To find out, we went old school. We commissioned a study of 1001 cat owners to understand the extremities. It’s here we found out kittens really do make us crazy in love.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

We discovered that 80% of owners knew they were allergic before they got a cat, and nearly 50% of those who are allergic have not one, but two cats in the household.

To ensure this wasn’t a rogue finding, we dug into social to find #CatAllergy has 4.4 million tags. And while the suffering could be seen as something negative, owners actually revel in how they’re at the mercy of their kitten.

Sheba was entering a small but cluttered market. Full of brands talking about what kittens need.

But despite the benefits they tout, this narrative hadn’t done much for the category over the past few years. The problem was, the adult food market offered the same benefits. While not ‘specially formulated’ for kittens, there was plenty more choice of ‘complete and balanced’ food that owners would simply feed a smaller portion of.

Sheba Kitten food was formulated for healthy growth too, but to win a big share of the market, we’d need to tell a different story. So rather than trying to sell parents on what their kitten needs, we lent into our taste credentials, positioning ourselves as the food kittens want.

Now when a cat wants something, they do it by charming their owner. They’ll stare deep into their eyes, weave between their legs and nuzzle them up close, making it hard to say no.

But a kitten has ten times the power of an adult cat. In fact young kittens elicit the strongest emotional responses in their owners, feelings of warmth, care, tenderness and above all else, love.

To break the functional mould of the category we wanted to celebrate the power kittens held in their paws to get what they want. So we looked at the extremities, how far would kitten parents go. And as we discovered, love can make you do some crazy things.

The insight: 1 in 4 cat owners are allergic to cats but have one anyway.

Millions of Americans are sniffing, snotty, coughing, itching, and wheezing, all because they can’t resist their kitten. They’re quite literally willing to suffer in the name of love.

This insane insight formed the basis of our launch campaign ‘You’ll do anything for a kitten’, focusing not on the kitten itself, but the effect kittens have on us, both physically and emotionally.

The creative brought together a visually arresting partnership of purring kittens and puffy eyes, sweet looks and swollen faces, as we made lovesick owners the unmissable faces of our campaign, burning, crying and completely in love.

Set to an Elvis Presley style love song, our short form films celebrated the deep love between two allergic owners and their Sheba-seeking kittens, calling out the 1 in 4 statistic directly.

We ran the campaign across more than 100 out-of-home screens purposefully placed next to large pharmacies in New York City, offering 2000 Sheba discounts via QR codes to those owners heading in for their antihistamines.

We even sent starter packs directly to kitten owning micro-influencers. Comprising a free pack, kitten blanket and branded tissues, giving them a way to wipe those watery eyes.

One simple data point drove success on a huge scale.

We reached pet parents at scale.

The campaign was seen 608 million times.

We sold a lot of kitten food.

Sheba had benchmarked $10.8M in sales for the first year, but sold $17.3M worth of kitten food, 62% more than expected.

We grew by stealing from competitors.

64% of our volume growth came from competitors, and what’s more 25% of that was stolen from our biggest competitor Fancy Feast.

But most incredibly, we grew a category notoriously hard to grow.

1 in 5 Sheba Kitten buyers were completely new to the wet cat category.

Which had a hugely positive impact on the wider business.

We reversed the decline in consideration, growing it by 4% in just three months.