Case study / Retail × community × commerce
Petco
Building social into a national retail growth engine
Director, Social Media & Commerce, 2011 to 2014
Executive summary
Create Petco’s first social commerce and digital engagement organization, then make it useful across brand, stores, vendors, events and animal welfare programs.
Documented performance
A national community already in motion
Documented in 2013 operating reports. Bars compare audience and view counts on a common linear scale.
The challenge
What needed
to change.
Social activity existed across a large retail ecosystem, but the company needed a central operating model that could connect community attention to commerce, partner value and local execution.
The insight
The unlock.
Petco already had the ingredients: pet parents, associates, vendors, adoption partners, events, experts and stores. The opportunity was to make them work together instead of treating social as a separate channel.
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.
PR Newswire / Petco
Petco Announces First Great Ones Contest Winner
Petco's release preserves the national contest result, thousands of submissions and the connected $50,000 consumer prize plus $50,000 shelter donation.$100K paired prizeOpen original source ↗02 / June 9, 2012
TVmaze / Animal Planet record
Tanked: Where the Wild Things Are
The surviving episode record documents the three custom Petco installations created for the national Animal Planet partnership.Open original source ↗03 / September 19, 2012
iMedia archive
Petco's Caturday Video Series
The surviving presentation captures Kat and Hill's partner Tyler Milfeld explaining the community, content and vendor-investment model firsthand.Open original source ↗
The value loop
How the idea
compounds.
- 01Pet community→
- 02Useful entertainment→
- 03Partner investment→
- 04Commerce and loyalty→
- 05More community value
The outcome creates fuel for the next cycle.
The operating system
From idea
to execution.
- 01
Built the function, operating cadence and cross functional standards
- 02
Created Caturday with Emota, then secured Hill's Pet Nutrition and Tyler Milfeld as its first vendor partner around hairball awareness
- 03
Turned the first partnership into an investable cooperative model that attracted increasingly competitive vendor support
- 04
Integrated social across Westminster, SXSW, adoption programs, Rose Parade appearances and broadcast moments
- 05
Stewarded the new Petco identity across social, video and experiential work
- 06
Developed local page governance, crisis response and performance reporting
Supporting evidence
What the
work shows.
- 2013 operating reports document 2.25M Facebook likes, 55K+ Twitter followers and 6.036M+ YouTube views at that point in the program.
- The surviving 2012 iMedia Brand Summit presentation documents Caturday as a strategy to identify, engage and activate cat loyalists through entertaining cat content, useful care information and the first Hill's Pet Nutrition partnership.
- Kat and Hill's partner Tyler Milfeld presented the work together, preserving a firsthand record of the trust, creative partnership and early proof that made the larger vendor model possible.
- Reporting also captures adoption event amplification, broadcast pickup, vendor programming and localized social governance.
- The work included The Great Ones, Caturday, Woof Wednesday, Westminster and creator programs built around recognizable pet personalities.
- The team supported the business across functions instead of operating as a standalone content desk.
Hero campaign and speaking evidence / September 19, 2012
The first partner made the model possible.
Kat Smith and Hill's Pet Nutrition partner Tyler Milfeld present the sincere strategy behind Caturday: use entertaining cat content to earn attention, pair it with genuinely useful care and nutrition information, and give a trusted vendor a meaningful role in the community. Hill's was Caturday's first sponsor. That early partnership became proof for a cooperative model that later attracted larger, increasingly competitive vendor investments.
Play the original filmiMedia Connection archiveiMedia Brand Summit 2012: Petco's Caturday Video Series
Personal origin evidence / May 9, 2013
The work was always personal.
Published by Petco, this associate spotlight makes the work personal. Kat appears with her adopted animal family and speaks from the lived experience of a pet parent, revealing the emotional foundation beneath the social commerce, community and animal welfare systems she was building for the brand.
Play the original filmOfficial Petco archiveKat and Her Adopted Family: A Petco Associate Spotlight