A pet owner wakes up and as they are about to go put some food in their dog’s bowl, they see that they have ran out. What is stopping this pet owner from simply driving to the local pet store and getting the essentials for their family’s best friend? During a time where not many people were comfortable with sharing their credit card information online, there was no reason to purchase the product on the internet. This introduces the first component of Pets.com’s flawed marketing decisions which is market research. In order to get a sense of the customer’s needs there it is very important to spend quality time assessing the market you are about to enter and doing extensive research to find opportunities and gaps on how to satisfy the customer.
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Pets.com may actually be offering a variety of different options, however it is very difficult to get a connection with the consumers over the internet, especially in the late 90’s. What is the company offering that the pet owner is willing to have shipped and wait for its arrival? This situation alone brings up two key issues. First issue is, did Pets.com ask themselves if selling online and shipping the product was the best channel of distribution for their success? Secondly, what value proposition is Pets.com providing for customers to purchase online over the well-established competitors with stores? With Pets.com failing to answer these questions, competitors such at Petopia jumped ahead having around 465 stores around the US and 100 stores globally . In the end a main reason Pets.com failed was that they weren’t able to cut down distribution costs through physical stores such as their competitors showing the lack of detail that the company paid to their core product and channels of distribution. In their overall marketing strategy, Petsmart.com begins to show signs of failure through the constant price decreasing which doesn’t allow them to be a profitable business as well as failure in their marketing communications. An example of this is when Pets.com established the face of their franchise through a sock puppet character that they created in 2000. The puppet went on to be so popular that it was featured in many parades, this resulted in the company spending around $1.2 million to launch a super bowl TV commercial hoping to boost up the sales . Pets.com failed to realize that while the company was getting an increase in awareness through their comical media and their slogan “pets.com because pets can’t drive” , it wasn’t necessarily generating any revenue. There was awareness and some interest, but ultimately not enough action was taken by a significant group of consumers to ensure that the
Pets.com may actually be offering a variety of different options, however it is very difficult to get a connection with the consumers over the internet, especially in the late 90’s. What is the company offering that the pet owner is willing to have shipped and wait for its arrival? This situation alone brings up two key issues. First issue is, did Pets.com ask themselves if selling online and shipping the product was the best channel of distribution for their success? Secondly, what value proposition is Pets.com providing for customers to purchase online over the well-established competitors with stores? With Pets.com failing to answer these questions, competitors such at Petopia jumped ahead having around 465 stores around the US and 100 stores globally . In the end a main reason Pets.com failed was that they weren’t able to cut down distribution costs through physical stores such as their competitors showing the lack of detail that the company paid to their core product and channels of distribution. In their overall marketing strategy, Petsmart.com begins to show signs of failure through the constant price decreasing which doesn’t allow them to be a profitable business as well as failure in their marketing communications. An example of this is when Pets.com established the face of their franchise through a sock puppet character that they created in 2000. The puppet went on to be so popular that it was featured in many parades, this resulted in the company spending around $1.2 million to launch a super bowl TV commercial hoping to boost up the sales . Pets.com failed to realize that while the company was getting an increase in awareness through their comical media and their slogan “pets.com because pets can’t drive” , it wasn’t necessarily generating any revenue. There was awareness and some interest, but ultimately not enough action was taken by a significant group of consumers to ensure that the