Passion for Pups: Camp Bow Wow's top marketing dog

Christy Barnes calls her clients "pet parents" at Camp Bow Wow, the Colorado-based pet care franchise with more than 200 locations in 40 states and Canada. It's a fun name for the brand's clients, but make no mistake, Barnes, the company's vice president of marketing, is serious about building the brand's awareness and driving more visits to its doggy daycare and boarding locations.

"I have the amazing job of sharing our mission of Making Dogs Happy with pet parents across North America, creating loyal customers, and attracting prospective franchise owners," she says.

Barnes, who has been with Camp Bow Wow since 2013, has held other positions on the marketing team, including senior marketing manager and director of marketing. As vice president of marketing, she oversees brand image, leads the strategy to improve national awareness, and supports development of all marketing communications and campaigns throughout the franchise system, all in an effort to drive unit-level growth.

But she never loses sight of the Camp Bow Wow mission of Making Dogs Happy. That means helping to create a fun and safe experience for dogs while also providing peace of mind for pet parents who trust Camp Bow Wow with their furry children.

"Staying true to your mission and operating from a place of trust and transparency allows you to make business decisions that best serve your customers," says Barnes.

Describe your role as VP of Marketing. I lead the overall brand, marketing, and communication strategy and provide marketing support to our franchise owners. My objective is to build awareness of and affinity for the brand and to drive visits to our more than 200 doggy daycare and boarding locations.

What's the most challenging part of your job today? There is so much to balance! You must balance the needs of internal stakeholders, franchise owners, and customers while navigating the ever-changing marketing, technology, and consumer landscape. This requires a lot of creativity, flexibility, and listening to ensure you're creating and executing a marketing strategy that satisfies all parties while maintaining the integrity of your brand.

How has Covid-19 affected how you have led your brand's marketing efforts? Covid-19 forever changed the way people live and work. Before Covid-19, we were focused on promoting doggy daycare to pet parents who were away from home for long hours and whose dogs were bored and lonely at home. Now we must resonate with people who still work out of the home, as well as pet parents who work in the home. We've shifted our messaging to focus on the benefits to the dog's health and happiness and how our brand is a great fit no matter where you work. We also have had to adapt to customers' changing habits and need for convenience, technology, and privacy.

What are the 3 most important keys to being an effective marketing leader today? 1) Listen. Listen to your team, customers, franchise owners, frontline employees, the industry, and more. We can't make decisions in a bubble without understanding how it may affect various stakeholders. 2) Adapt. We've all heard the word "pivot" a little too frequently these past few years, but it is so important to be able to take in information and change course if there's a better way, a new trend, or a fresh idea. 3) Track. While technology presents many challenges, there are countless data points you can measure and track to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

How do you prepare a marketing plan and execute the strategies? The first step is to understand your goals, target customer, budget, and brand positioning. From there, you can pick and choose tactics and messaging that will reach your preferred audience and track progress toward your objectives. It helps to have a great team and partners who focus on their areas of expertise and will support the overall goals and strategy.

How do you measure marketing results and effectiveness? At the end of the day, we need to attract new customers and encourage frequency and increased spend among existing customers. Depending on the tactic, there may be a different metric that we measure to determine effectiveness. For example, in our digital marketing acquisition efforts, we measure conversions of new customers and closely track cost per conversion, conversion rate, click-through rate, and ROI. In our communications with existing customers, we track things like email open rate or service attachment rate. If we make improvements to these metrics, that will naturally lead to an increase both in new customers and in current customer engagement and loyalty.

Discuss your core consumer marketing strategies and objectives. Nationally, we are mainly focused on digital marketing and advertising so we can focus our budget on areas where we have an open camp. We run national YouTube, display, Meta, and connected TV advertising as well as maintain a strong organic content strategy. Locally, we encourage our camps to have a strong digital marketing plan as well as local community marketing efforts to build awareness and trust in their market.

How do you go about creating a customer-centric marketing and brand philosophy? It starts with first understanding your target customer: who they are, how they think, and what drives their purchase decisions. We do regular customer research to understand our customer profile, needs, and habits to reach customers in the way they want to be reached and speak to them in a way that resonates with them. While pet parents are our paying customers and ultimate decision makers, our mission is Making Dogs Happy. Therefore, our focus is entirely on providing a fun and safe experience for dogs, which gives pet parents peace of mind about their decision to trust Camp Bow Wow with their furry child.

Describe your marketing team and the role each plays. We have four distinct functions on our marketing team that work together to build our brand and support our franchise owners. We have an in-house creative team responsible for brand and visual identity, a digital team that manages all organic and paid digital marketing efforts and platforms, a general marketing team that supports franchise owner needs and national and local marketing programs, and a communications team that manages internal and external communications. Each team also contributes to franchise development marketing and marketing for our nonprofit organization, the Bow Wow Buddies Foundation.

Why is it so important for the marketing department to have a personal touch when it comes to helping the brand connect with franchise prospects? We are a very personal brand since we care for furry family members. Everyone at the company, from camp counselors to our company president, is passionate about dogs. It's impossible not to let that show when working with prospects since we want them to share in that same passion and dedication to dogs. We provide a ton of support to our franchise owners throughout the lifetime of their camp, so it's also important that our prospects feel the dedication and care from the beginning.

How does this help your franchise sales and development effort? Our franchise owners know that they won't just be another number or no-name business owner. They are a part of a group of like-minded people, and they know we are here to help them be successful for the long term.

What ways/tools do you rely on to do this? We don't outsource sales to brokers, so all our prospects really feel connected to the brand and the people in the company from the start. We also spend a lot of time getting to know prospects and allowing them to get to know us, ending in the final stage with Join the Pack days where prospects get to meet and hear from the entire leadership team and feel confident in their decision.

What do today's prospects expect from the franchise marketing department? How do you provide it? Today's prospects are looking for a lot of information and validation before investing. From a marketing perspective, we provide a lot of resources to allow them to really get to know us and showcase stories and testimonials from franchise owners so they trust that they are making a great decision.

How does today's consumer and marketing data help you fine-tune your marketing initiatives? We review a variety of data to help understand and refine our marketing efforts--to know what messages or visuals are working, what channels are most effective in driving conversions, etc. We also recently completed our first-ever brand awareness study. Moving forward, this will be an annual study so we can measure overall recognition and recall of the brand.

Describe the evolving role of social media in your brand's marketing efforts. Social media has been a big part of our brand since I began with the company over 9 years ago. We have such a fun and engaging service that social lends itself well to our strategy. Over the years, we have adapted our efforts to align with changing features, algorithms, and new platforms coming on the scene. But overall, we have remained focused on showcasing what we do in a playful, authentic way.

How do you work with other internal departments? Does technology help? We work very closely with internal teams to support their needs. This includes creative support, key rollouts of services and technology, and collaborating with other teams to help get camps open and operating successfully. We use technology to support remote collaboration and project and task management programs to stay efficient and remove silos.

Do you see vendors as business partners? Why/why not? Yes! They are an extension of our team and we rely heavily on our vendor partners to bring ideas, best practices, and support in their particular areas of expertise. We would not be able to do what we do without the partnership of our vendors.

How have marketing strategies/tools changed over the past decade? How have you adapted? There has been an ongoing shift to more digital, automation, and personalization over the past 10 years. This is only going to become more prevalent as we get more technological as a society and as customers expect faster, more personal interactions with businesses. We have provided a variety of tools and resources to our franchise owners to allow them to execute marketing strategies and tactics quickly and effectively and have amped up our corporate digital efforts and technology to better serve the tech-savvy, convenience-driven customer.

What advice would you offer to aspiring marketing executives? Marketing tactics and channels may change, but knowing your customer, building a strong brand identity, and tying marketing efforts to business objectives will always remain foundational to your marketing strategy. Start with those foundations and stay firm with them, but be creative and have fun with how and where you execute.