Financial Branding Worthy of a Pet’s Love for All Pet Card
There’s nothing quite like a cuddle from a pet to melt away the day’s stress. Now imagine trying to capture that warmth in a financial brand, without playing into sad clichés.
It’s a rare breed, pun very much intended: a financial services brand that manages to tap into your heart and your wallet, and leave you feeling really good about the entire experience. But that’s exactly what we set out to create for All Pet Card, a brand-new entry to the fast-growing buy now, pay later industry, and the first exclusively focused on the pet industry.
All Pet Card is a credit card that can only be used for purchases at participating pet care providers, allowing pet owners to pay for vet bills over time. It was challenge enough to balance the stark reality of rising pet care costs with the warmth of a pet’s love. But here’s another wrinkle: All Pet Card is offered exclusively through veterinary practices, so the brand needed to speak both to the vets and pet owners.
Starting with warm and fuzzy brand language.
Our earliest explorations of the All Pet Card brand were all on paper, all with words. While far too many financial, healthcare and even pet care brands lead with fear tactics and worst-case scenarios, we wanted to set a different, warmer tone, just like pets do for us in our lives. The brand narratives—one for each core audience—evoke that feeling of coming home that can only be expressed through wet noses, wagging tails and loud purrs.
We started to explore brand visuals fairly early on in the process and landed on the one you saw at the top of this post. We thought that pup just looked so happy. This sparked the initial idea for a tagline about happy pets… but we knew we needed to bring the financial aspect into the core promise as well. That led us to Healthy pets. Happy wallets.
These four simple words speak to both audiences, but feel personal and targeted for each. We knew we had landed somewhere special… but also that our work had just begun.
Telling the story with bright colors and bold photos.
With a unique spin on dark blue and teal, All Pet Card leans into the emotions like confidence and trust that are so vital to the financial industry. What brings the brand to life, though, is the occasional pop of orange—and the clear photos of some of the cutest pets you’ll ever see.
Rolling out the All Pet Card brand… and rolling… and rolling…
Of course, with a new brand and aggressive rollout plan, we had a ton of pieces to create for All Pet Card for both audiences, from sales flyers and ads to in-practice promotions and yes, even the credit card itself. Our goal was to bring enough variety to make the pieces feel fresh, but also to maintain the consistency necessary to quickly build brand recognition with both pet owners and veterinarians.
Our experience in the financial industry taught us, however, that it’s not always as easy as it seems.
Balancing clarity with compliance across a full suite of collateral.
As we moved forward with a multitude of pieces, one of the biggest challenges we faced was maintaining consistency and accuracy as the bank’s legal department started to explore the pieces. The rules are, rightfully so, very strict and specific regarding disclaimers and promises around financing and credit cards. This affected both copy and design, as the rules dictate font sizes and weights as well.
Though we’ve navigated regulatory changes in the past, they’re always evolving, and we learned a lot as we balanced version control across the many pieces in the campaign, especially as changes to sometimes-minute details in the legal language affected multiple pieces of the campaign.
Taking it to the web.
While a huge portion of the work for All Pet Card lives in the old-school print world, we could not ignore the web experience. We built the site—with targeted sections for pet owners and practices—on a tight timeframe, requiring some innovation in how we designed and developed the pages.
Like the brand, allpet.com balances the seriousness of pet care costs with the joy and fun of pet ownership. With a toggle at the top, users can easily see the website experience and information that’s applicable to them. A payment calculator for pet owners and a link to prequalify makes getting started easy. And a resource center for practitioners includes a demo, training materials and more.
Every page is simple, bold and focused on the user—and, of course, some adorable animals for good measure.
Doing it all for pets.
We’re thrilled with the All Pet Card brand and can’t wait to see where our client takes the brand next. Wherever it goes, we know a smile—and a bark and a purr—will follow.
