A new brand campaign from Pet Valu looks to comedically and authentically highlight the relationships its staff builds with pet owners and their animals.

The specialty retailer launched its new “They Grow Up So Fast” brand campaign, which shows one of its employees tearfully attached to a customer’s pet that has grown to become an adult. The campaign includes a series of 15-second spots that will run on traditional and social media throughout the year.

“We wanted to make a change in focus in this [campaign] to the triangle relationship between devoted pet lovers, animal care experts and the pet,” Pet Valu VP of marketing Idan Driman tells strategy. He adds that the campaign was also designed to communicate key differentiators for the brand in the compassionate care and expertise it provides.

The brand began working on the campaign in October with the goal of having a refreshed brand campaign it could run throughout 2024. The campaign builds off of Pet Valu’s “Love Lives Here” platform that Driman says successfully resonated with its target audience.

Pet Valu’s aim in its new campaign is to capture the emotion that owners themselves feel as their pets grow older, by highlighting the relationship between its target audience of pet lovers, their pets and the retailer’s staff. To ensure the authenticity of the campaign, Driman says the brand ran focus groups that gathered feedback both from its target audience, as well as the retailer’s own associates, owners and operators of its various stores.

Driman says the focus groups were part of the brand’s overall effort to ensure the scenarios it was describing in its campaign felt authentic, which can better ensure the longevity of a campaign.

“Any campaign that we are doing, we’re looking for it to be the best spot for Pet Valu. One litmus test that we usually run with ourselves is asking ‘Are we the only brand that can present that spot?’ If the answer is no, we should try to find something else. It has to be authentic and true to our brand,” Driman says.

Driman adds that the campaign also puts more emphasis on brand recall with cues such as a Pet Valu employee and store location itself appearing in the spot.

Arrivals + Departures oversaw the creative, while True Media handled the media buy, which includes a mix of linear and connected TV, as well as YouTube and social media.