According to the American Pet Product Association, pet owners spent around $60 billion on their furry friends in 2015, including approximately $23 billion on pet food alone.
Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of kibble.
And retailers across many verticals are competing fiercely for a piece of this huge prize.
To answer this question, Field Agent recently surveyed 300 verified dog and/or cat owners. We asked, “Where do you purchase most of your pet food and other pet supplies from?”
Mass merchandisers were the alphas in our survey at 37%, followed by pet specialty retailers (30%) like PetCo and PetSmart in not-too-distant second place.
To further illuminate this competition for pet owners, we deployed one-third of these dog and cat owners to 100 stores across the country, where they audited pet supply prices, displays, and product availability. Specifically, we sent 10 Agents apiece to mass merchandisers Walmart and Target, and 40 Agents apiece to pet specialty chains PetCo and PetSmart.
Our pet supply audit dealt with 3 important questions:
As the table below demonstrates, we asked Agents to record the regular price of 4 popular pet products along with photo verification.
Walmart undercut its competitors on all four products, by just a penny on the wet cat food but more substantially on the other goods. Consider two additional observations:
See also: Mobile Audits: The Weapon of Choice Against Limited In-Store Vision
Field Agent also audited 4 product displays at the two pet specialty chains.
As seen in the table, for each display we calculated an availability score, or the percentage of stores with the display on the floor.
On average, the two pet specialty retailers received a display availability score of 85%, with the highest score 95% for the Vera Artisan Meats endcap and the lowest score 78% for the Furminator “Shed Control” endcap.
Finally, we conducted a product availability audit by asking Agents to report the number of display compartments/pegs with out-of-stocks.
In all, 94% of display compartments/hooks were stocked with at least one product unit. The lowest in-stock score was 88% for the Furminator endcap while the highest score was attributed to Vera Artisan Meats at 99.5%.
Notably, the highest availability and in-stock scores belonged to the same display, and, likewise, the lowest availability/in-stock scores belonged to the same display.
Quality product? You have one.
Solid strategy? You have that, too.
Persuasive shopper marketing? Oh yeah.
But how’s your retail execution? Even companies with the best products, strategies, and marketing often lose sales to retail oversights.
Download “Mobile Audits: How It Works” to learn how Mobile Audits crowdsource smartphones to help brands monitor displays, signage, prices, on-shelf availability, on-shelf placement, and other aspects of your retail execution.