Pets. Com Case Study

Ultimately, the tragic failure of Pets.com was because of a lack of market knowledge, mismanagement of funds and overestimating the power of internet which they became too reliant upon. I believe Pets.com was incapable of looking at their own company externally. If they were asked what industry are we in? Pets.com’s answer would be something like the ecommerce business rather than the home and pet industry. This is a similar example to the company Kodak as they failed to adapt to the fast-paced market and only looked at themselves internally and didn’t adjust to the digital age. When analyzing and brainstorming ideas to see what Pets.com could have done to sustain their business, I am going to look at it through the perspective of keeping their

In my opinion, many changes could have occurred to Pets.com’s marketing strategy that could have allowed them to grow financially. Starting off with distribution, a big flaw in their system was the amount of time customers had to wait for the pet food to arrive. If they were to resolve their issue of money mismanagement, I would recommend that some of the funds would be spent towards effective warehouses. As a result, the shipping time would be much faster and the speed at which Pets.com can ship the product could have become a competitive advantage for the company. Another method of distribution that I would have implemented would be cooperating with local vets and animal clinics to promote the products in similar fashion to dental clinics and tooth products. This will allow the core product to get promoted as well as reduce the delivery times. As far as the product component, as I mentioned before, I believe Pets.com should have taken advantage of their relationship with Amazon and pushed their brand image as a company that provides the best quality for the pet in your

Furthermore, in the most simplistic way, Pets.com needed to lower the amount of money spend on marketing communications. looking at it in more detail, the company did manage to share an intended message to the audience through their famous super bowl commercial, but what they failed to realise what that “sticking out” compared to your competitors is not effective if there is no call to action. This once again reflects upon their lack of research as Pets.com’s focused more on creating a product and promoting it rather than analyzing the main components such as customers, market and competitors. Through a managerial perspective, I would recommend lowering the budget for marketing communications and using it towards magazines and posters at animal clinics. Using this method, they directly reach pet owners specifically rather than anyone who could be watching the tv commercial at the time. Lastly, adjustments to Pets.com’s pricing strategy would have proved to be effective in helping them sustain their business. For a company who promotes the belief in the quality of their products, the last thing you want to do is give in to price sensitive customers. With the constant decrease in prices, not only did Pets.com lose money on sales, but they also ruined the brand that they had set out to