Essays on data-driven pet food marketing and buyer preferences

Abstract

Pet food has become an increasingly important component of the global pet care industry as rising pet ownership, premiumization, and the humanization of pets continue to reshape consumer preferences and firm strategies. Despite rapid market growth, publicly available research in pet food economics and management has not kept pace with the industry’s need for decision-relevant evidence on consumer behavior, product attributes, and market outcomes. This dissertation contains three essays designed to provide research-based insights into the relationships among pet health, consumer preferences, purchasing behavior, and ingredient positioning, with the objective of informing future research, product development, and marketing strategies in the pet food industry. The first essay examines how reported feeding practices, exercise, product characteristics, and dog characteristics are associated with a breed-adjusted measure of canine weight deviation. The analysis integrates a nationwide survey of U.S. dog owners with product-level information and applies quantile regression to examine whether these associations differ across the conditional weight-deviation distribution. Total daily caloric intake is positively associated with weight deviation across important portions of the distribution, while dog age is also consistently associated with higher weight deviation. Treat frequency, feeding frequency, food form, breed size, and reproductive status are associated with weight outcomes in selected portions of the distribution, whereas reported exercise relationships are mixed. These findings indicate that canine weight outcomes are associated with a combination of feeding decisions, pet characteristics, and product-related factors rather than a single behavior or product characteristic. The second essay investigates whether pet owners’ stated attribute preferences are reflected in the characteristics of the food and treat products they report purchasing. The analysis introduces a Match Index Score that measures preference-purchase alignment across health, ingredient, processing, and supply-chain attributes. The findings show that alignment varies substantially across attribute categories and between food and treats. Natural and Made in USA attributes display relatively strong visibility in both owner priorities and reported products, whereas larger gaps emerge for digestive-health, fresh, and minimally processed attributes. Alignment also varies with owner age, income, education, dog size, allergy status, and product price. In particular, higher product prices are associated with lower alignment in several specifications. These findings demonstrate that stated importance should not automatically be interpreted as realized demand because affordability, product availability, familiarity, palatability, and pet-specific needs may intervene between preference formation and purchase. The third essay examines consumer preferences for sorghum relative to rice, barley, quinoa, corn, oat, and millet using survey-based grain-choice data and multinomial logit models. Sorghum is not the leading choice in any of the three comparison sets. Younger respondents are relatively more receptive to sorghum, whereas older respondents generally favor competing grains. Respondents who prioritize digestive health or weight control are less likely to select sorghum in several comparisons, suggesting that consumers do not yet strongly associate sorghum with these benefits. Avoidance of corn, soy, or wheat increases sorghum preference when corn is a competing alternative, while sustainability improves sorghum’s position primarily when it is compared with rice and barley. These results show that sorghum’s market potential depends on the competing ingredient, the consumer segment, and the benefit being communicated. Taken together, these essays provide new insights into the economic and behavioral factors shaping pet food markets. The central lesson of the dissertation is that success in pet food depends on alignment, alignment between feeding behavior and canine health needs, between expressed preferences and feasible purchases, and between an ingredient’s technical benefits and the meanings consumers attach to it. Pet food manufacturers and marketers must therefore consider not only what can be formulated or claimed, but also how owners understand, select, afford, and use products in everyday settings.