“Everything a brand does—from stores to product to packaging to how you feel about that brand—has to be designed,” says Lee Clow.

Clow’s advertising and design agency, TBWA\chiat\day, has had a hand in helping to design the brand culture at Apple Computer and other clients. But one of the agency’s most interesting recent case studies is Pedigree. It offers a great example of how a company can use a design approach to basically reinvent itself and start fresh.

When Pedigree turned to Clow for a new ad campaign several years ago, he proposed something much more—a transformation that went way beyond ads. In effect, he suggested that Pedigree redesign the way the company operates and even the way it thinks about itself.  

“With Pedigree we had to help them to discover their culture and behavior,” Clow says, adding that when a company embarks on this kind of change, it must start by figuring out “what it truly believes, as opposed to what it makes or sells.”

Pedigree had a history that showed a commitment to the well-being of dogs; it was among the first to offer packaged pet food as a healthier alternative to feeding dogs table scraps. But the brand needed to do a better job of demonstrating that it cared about dogs. And even internally, Pedigree had to try to instill the idea among its own people that they worked “for a dog company, not a dog food company.”

One of the first steps was to design internal communications to rally the company behind this new belief system—starting with a manifesto expressed in the form of an elegant company manual titled “Dogma.” Lushly illustrated with photographic portraits of dogs, it laid out the new philosophy in poetic language.

The Dogma book was just one of the ways the company used design to change its corporate culture. Clow had advised Pedigree that if it intended to be a company for dog-lovers, it should “walk the walk” by implementing dog-friendly policies in its own workplace. So the company began to encourage employees to bring their dogs to work—and as part of that effort, Clow’s team helped redesign ID badges and business cards that featured images of workers’ dogs.

Pedigree also began to extend healthcare benefits to those dogs—opening the door for the company to become an advocate for other companies in other industries to consider doing likewise.

Life at Pedigree changed overnight, as all the offices “went to the dogs.” And the company also stepped up its involvement in dog-related issues and causes—in particular, its support of shelter dogs. Pedigree launched a yearly initiative to encourage people to adopt homeless dogs, and it was an immediate success. In 2008, the agency designed a pop-up dog store in Times Square that featured a dog adoption center—and in one weekend, the Pedigree adoption store brought in 12,000 visitors.

The adoption drives have drawn extensive and highly-favorable press coverage for Pedigree. And according to Clow, “What Pedigree has discovered after three years of doing the adoption drives is they actually sell more dog food during that period than any other time of the year—even though the ads during the drive aren’t talking about selling dog food.”

Design also was used to communicate the new Pedigree culture by way of fresh  packaging (featuring some of the same emotional dog portraiture that started in the Dogma manifesto). Meanwhile, Pedigree revamped its website, inviting people to upload photos of their dogs and share their dog stories. And in the latest twist on the campaign, the agency convinced Pedigree that it should establish an international holiday for dogs, on the date of October 11.

Pedigree has increased market share during the course of the campaign, but perhaps the biggest payoff is the one Clow observed in the people who work for the company. “They used to come to work every day thinking they worked for a dog food company,” he said, “and now they come in thinking they work for a company that loves dogs.”

(Editor’s note: This post was adapted from a story by Warren Berger in one.design magazine; the Pedigree corporate redesign story is also featured in Glimmer).
 

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