Being on the marketing team at Vetcelerator has an exciting twist because we are a brand that supports veterinary brands. Our team is all marketers, and we market two-fold, which means marketing for our clients’ brands and our brand. For our clients, we stand by our mission statement that every business problem is a marketing problem, and we’re here to help solve them. We work to shape our clients’ brands in numerous ways: designing veterinary websites, running ads to max out dog grooming and training appointment calendars, assisting all of our veterinary practice clients in saving hundreds (even thousands) on their COGS, and recruiting the best people to represent their brands. We’ve written a ton of content around building our customers’ brands, but in this piece, we are going to focus on a fun story around building Vetcelerators’ brand and the lessons we’re still learning.
Focusing on our mission statement that every business problem is a marketing problem, one of the problems our brand was trying to solve is how to authentically represent ourselves, Vetcelerator, as a brand in imagery. For our clients, imagery is reasonably straightforward. For the veterinarian who only services dogs and cats, the images would reflect just that: happy and healthy dogs and cats. For clinics that specialize in equestrian or bovine care, the photos and imagery would typically feature horses and cows. Easy stuff.
Shout out to some of our clients who sent us photos! Check out their websites.
TruVet Pet Hospital
Easyvet Winter Garden
Country Club Vet
We Are Pet People
When approaching the challenge of a visual reputation of our brand, we first considered our brand’s values of authenticity, adaptability, transparency, passion, and ownership. Our image needs to be a reflection and reinforcement of our values, so we started with authenticity and questioned what that means for our brand.
First, it means that our brand should look like our people, so we considered who our people are and what the shared values of our team are. It turns out it was easy; we’re pet people. Fun fact: at Vetcelerator, our staff has a total of:
- 22 Dogs
- 10 Cats
- 3 Turtles
- 45 Koi Fish
- 12 Medium Fish Tanks
- & Neocardina Shrimp and Aquatic Snails
Our team is made up of people like…
Lynn, our Clinic Inventory Strategist, fosters dogs and is a regular volunteer at her local shelter.
Heather, one of our Client Success Managers, Heather is a former veterinary assistant and dog mom (and kid mom!).
So… What Do Pet People Look Like?
Our next step is to define how to visually represent “pet people” who provide software and marketing services to vet and pet brands. Defining what is not a reflection of our brand was honestly easier. Considering the value of authenticity, we decided that stock images of pets and AI-generated photos weren’t going to cut it for our new website.
While stock images and AI images are useful and abundantly available, they aren’t a reflection of us.
The Photo Contest
This idea was sparked by a dedicated Slack channel (an internal communication tool) we have for sharing photos of our pets. It’s our daily dose of adorable, and everyone in the company participates, from Tyler, our CFO, sharing photos of his pup in the hot tub to Paola, one of our quality control specialists, sharing photos of her new pet turtle. Here, we also grieve together, sharing stories of our pets who have crossed the Rainbow Bridge. This is authenticity; this is our people. This concept needs to be incorporated into our brand’s visual representation. We also tell our clients the same things when designing their websites. Send us as many photos as possible!
We needed authentic photos of animals and, ideally, pets in the workspace, so we devised a creative solution: a photo contest for our employees. The contest was to submit your favorite photos of your pets with 4 winning categories: Best in Show, Most Personality, Cutest, and People’s Choice, where everyone votes on their favorite of the three winners. With cash prizes and bragging rights as motivation, we generated over 420 pet photos in under a week.
Some of the entries:
The Winning Photos:
Leading With Values in Our Brand
When building a brand, your values and the people behind it must be aligned. The lesson we learned is that using our values of authenticity and passion to guide how we visually represent our brand led to a hugely successful campaign. In under 7 days, we created a library of real-life pet photos, with almost everyone in the company participating in the campaign.
The photos will be featured in the hero images of our website and tastefully sprinkled throughout the site. They will also be used in the content we produce for our Vetcelerator websites and in our social media posts for our clients.
We’ve got to give a shoutout to Dr. Townsend from Dirigo Veterinary Care. He is nailing authenticity, so much so we’ve already written a case study on him called “A Lesson in Authenticity.” Just recently, Dirigo posted this image on Facebook.
Again, killing it with authenticity, and look at the engagement! Great job, Dirigo team.
Conclusion
We love our pets. At Vetcelerator, our team is a beautiful combination of pet people of all backgrounds.
Building a brand that reflects our people and values includes our pets. Just as we continually improve and refine the visual representation for our clients (logo, website design, flyers), we are also constantly reshaping our own brand to ensure it accurately reflects our values. We’ll be rolling out a redesigned vetcelerator.com website soon that will highlight our people, values, messaging, and, of course, our pets.
