Case study / Owned community × customer experience × platform adoption
Petco Pet Talk Place
Building an owned community before community led growth had a name
Community strategy, RFP, brand design, team build and launch leadership, 2012
Executive summary
Create Petco’s first owned community—from platform selection and brand design through team build and launch—as a trusted destination for pet parents, experts, partners and customer support.
The challenge
What needed
to change.
Petco had enormous social reach, but rented social channels could not become the complete trusted resource pet parents needed. The business needed an owned environment where useful content, peer advice, expert participation and customer questions could compound over time.
The insight
The unlock.
The strongest community would not behave like another campaign page. It would connect customers with each other and bring veterinarians, subject matter experts, influencers, partners and Petco knowledge into one searchable resource.
Campaign evidence
See the work
in motion.
Independent archive
The receipts
still exist.
Contemporary reporting and industry recognition preserve the campaign, its operating model and its measurable result.
The value loop
How the idea
compounds.
- 01Pet parent question→
- 02Expert and peer answers→
- 03Searchable knowledge→
- 04Customer confidence→
- 05Long-term loyalty
The outcome creates fuel for the next cycle.
The operating system
From idea
to execution.
- 01
Led the enterprise community-platform RFP and selected Lithium
- 02
Designed the Pet Talk Place brand and species-based experience architecture
- 03
Modeled the program on leading owned communities including Home Depot and Sephora
- 04
Hired Melanie Morrill and built internal leadership for the community’s continued growth
- 05
Introduced Pet Talk Place to the pet-blogger community at BarkWorld
- 06
Created a foundation for trusted answers, expert content, peer participation and self-service support
Supporting evidence
What the
work shows.
- Kat led the 2012 launch of Petco’s first owned community—from the Lithium RFP and brand design through hiring the program leader and introducing Pet Talk Place at BarkWorld.
- Pet Talk Place gave customers a welcoming destination to connect, share and learn—extending Petco’s value beyond the store and the social feed.
- A playful species-based architecture organized the experience around every kind of pet parent: bark, purr, splash, chirp, squeak and hiss.
- Search, registration, community guidelines, support and announcements made the experience useful from day one, while inviting early members to help shape what it became.
- The foundation continued to scale after launch, reaching 3.94 million FY15 page views, 2.53 million unique visitors and more than 15,000 registered members.
- The continuing program earned Lithium’s 2016 Total Community All Star recognition and demonstrated the long-term value of the owned-community system Kat initiated.