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Giving a brand its bite back
The direct-to-consumer pet food industry is crowded and fiercely competitive, a quick search online floods you with pay-per-click ads and special offers from many brands. Enter Bella+Duke — a brand with a bold mission, to enhance the longevity and quality of pets’ lives through a healthier, more natural, and nutrient-packed raw diet. With an ambitious vision, they needed break through in the market.
Partnering with their CEO (on a second brand together) and his incredible team, we reimagined the Bella+Duke brand to encapsulate where they are now, and where they are going. The new brand transcends just their food offer with a new strategic core of being 'all in' for pet wellbeing. The new verbal and visual identity have the flexibility for today’s business needs, and space for the future, tapping into the deep emotional connection between pet parents and their animals.
The first step was getting immersed into the business — understanding the vision, ambitions, and future goals. These conversations built the case for a big transformation. Starting with a new brand strategy, to give future direction, drive decisions, and propel the company forward.
Making such an ambitious rebrand a reality, took bringing together a senior cross-functional project team from Bella+Duke. Collectively playing a pivotal role in shaping decisions, ensuring each change and its impact was thoughtfully considered. This collaborative and open approach fostered a culture of shared ownership, paving the way for real, lasting change.
What we did
- Brand and competitor reviews
- Insight workshops and interviews (internal + customer)
- Brand strategy
- Visual identity
- Verbal identity (tone of voice)
- Customer testing
- Brand guidelines
- Launch campaign concept
Brand strategy — Getting to the heart of the beast
The Bella+Duke team are driven by a true passion for pets and their wellbeing. Starting with the sourcing and testing of each ingredient in their food, to the care and support they give. Discussions with their customers, really highlighted this — the silkiness of their pets’ coats and their boundless energy, to the team’s great knowledge and the 24/7 vet support. This sparked the big idea ‘all in’ for pet wellbeing. Forming the core of the strategy platform, informing the brand proposition, strategic pillars, and messaging. Next was to bring it to life through the whole brand.
Tone of voice – Making sure the bark matches the brain
The way a brand sounds and speaks is a reflection of its personality. Every email, social post, and advert gives a glimpse into the company, what they do, but also what they’re about, and the people in the business. Plus the tone has to work hand-in-hand with the visual identity, to create a powerful coherent brand experience. Joining forces with the Bella+Duke copywriting team, helped us define the brand’s messaging needs, which fed into the creation of a new distinctive verbal style. Distilling this into a clear framework with illustrative examples, helped them to be verbally on-brand for roll-out and onwards.
Naming – power in the plus and the purr
The subtle shift from ‘Bella and Duke’ to ‘Bella+Duke’ brought the brand’s mission into sharper focus. The addition of the ‘+’ symbolises the brand’s promise to offer something greater, underscoring its commitment to pet health and wellbeing. Another pivotal change was ensuring both a cat, and a dog, took centre stage in the brand’s symbol. Previously, cats played a quieter role, despite their growing importance to the business. It’s a visual and strategic alignment that clarifies Bella+Duke’s full offering to customers and is an internal reminder that cats are a key part of the brand’s future.
Digital Marketing: Bringing a new pet home
Big change carries the risk of disrupting online sales, counteracting against commercial goals of a rebrand. To safeguard against this, we collaborated with Bella+Dukes’s marketing and digital teams. Addressing concerns head-on avoided disruption, and seized the opportunity to test and optimise performance across the entire sales funnel — driving measurable success, and better results without compromising the business’s core objectives.
Launch campaign – Your loudest roars please
A standout campaign was needed for launch. The concept was based around a simple yet powerful idea: ‘Bella+Duke always gives you more.’ This idea steps from being all in, and not just for versatile, long-lasting content but also seamlessly integrates across the entire sales funnel – from attracting new customers to deepening loyalty with existing ones.
The campaign will feature tailored content while also tapping into Bella+Duke’s vibrant community, actively inviting them to the join the conversation and become a part of the brand’s ongoing story.
“Having worked with Ian and his team in the past I knew I could trust them with this game changing brief. We had an amazing product, but as a challenger brand to the big guns of the category, we really needed to get some bite back into our brand and deliver an equally amazing first impression and customer experience. Our takeouts from working with Styles+Partners are to:
Start with the vision and mission, to underpin everything. Understand the customer touchpoints, and bring the right message to life at the right moment with the perfect tone of voice, creative and stand out visuals. Continue to evolve the strategic framework and the creative work itself. This isn’t an outsourced piece of work. The Styles+Partners team spent a huge amount of time working as an extended part of our in-house brand and creative team, and the team are better for it today. We now have an amazing (strategic) platform to build on, not just a great suite of new creative that will last a few weeks.
Thank you Ian and Team!”
James Sturrock, Chief Executive Officer, Bella+Duke