European pet food brand Edgard & Cooper has spent the past year anchoring its experiential strategy to a fabricated "Pet Holiday Calendar"—a year's worth of invented, humor-led occasions, many of which the brand has turned into real-world events.

The approach stems from the company's effort to reclaim the "soul" of the brand, rooted in its core belief that pets deserve the best and that the bond between animals and their humans deserves celebration. Since last fall, the brand has curated pet-centric experiences that treat animals as true participants, spanning themes from entertainment and fashion to politics and art.

This year's calendar-based activations have ranged from The Ball Ball, a "Bridgerton"-themed soiree for dogs in London, to a live Viking Funeral in Margate, England, for destroyed chew toys. Outside the calendar, the brand has also paraded a 9-foot piece of kibble around the Louvre and then contacted the museum to insist the installation be displayed inside.

CMO Wouter Baert, working with agency The Disobedient and in-house teams, outlined five principles behind the strategy.

Building an imaginary world

The brand maintains consistency not through a fixed aesthetic or tone, but by ensuring every program fits the fantasy world showcased in its "If Pets Could Cook" ads.

"Campaigns can have their own visual world, and their own sub-world, too, as long as it still feels like it's us and it belongs to that imaginary world," Baert says.

Committing to the calendar

Rather than inventing a single holiday, Edgard & Cooper built an entire calendar and committed to bringing it to life through a series of experiences.

"When we talk about that joyful, imaginary world that you're experiencing with your pets, if that is a one-off, it's not really a world," he says. "So for something like the Pet Holiday Calendar to actually work, you have to really commit to it. And it has to be multiple things; it has to grow on people."

Comical, relatable formats

The most effective event formats and touchpoints, according to Baert, are those that feel like a wink and a nod to pet parents.

"What resonates the best, and what I always want to hear from people, is that it feels like an inside joke, that people who have a pet have this 'aha' moment where it feels like you get pets, and it made me smile," he says.

At The Ball Ball in London, dogs arrived as guests of honor in their finest attire. Touchpoints included a giant bone-shaped ice sculpture ("You're already thinking about pets wanting to lick that sculpture"), a ball pit set inside an elegant fountain installation ("Pets always want to go to the fancy places that they shouldn't," Baert says), a dog-friendly banquet table, live music from "Bridgerton's" string quartet and a "formal" portrait moment.

The same inside-joke spirit drove Chew Toy Remembrance Day, marked with a live Viking Funeral in Margate. Ahead of the event, social media users could sign up to give their pet's retired chew toy a sendoff on the brand's small-scale Viking ship by explaining why the item "deserved the most epic final chapter." On the day, the toys were piled into the vessel, set ablaze and pushed out to sea on their way to "Valhalla." Toys that didn't burn were later donated to a shelter partner, and fire elements were handled by licensed professionals under a "leave no trace" policy.

Social and digital celebrations

Online celebrations are equally central. The Top Cat Awards invite consumers to enter categories such as "Best Cat/Parent Lookalike" and "Most Judgy Stare." For Pet Rights Week, the brand ran a political apology initiative around Iceland's historic dog ban, including an official petition demanding Reykjavik apologize for prohibiting dogs in the city from 1924 to 1984. Posters promoting the cause appeared in high-traffic spots including outside the Embassy of Iceland in London and across the street from Big Ben.

Tracking brand- and campaign-level KPIs

The brand measures success through two lenses. At the campaign level, one sentence defines the metric: "We want remarkable creatives seen by millions." The brand gauges impact against a chart divided into four phrases: it's boring, it's remarkable, it's only seen by our employees, and it's seen by millions.

At a higher level, Edgard & Cooper tracks traditional full-funnel data across awareness, consideration and trial—but Baert says the bigger picture matters most.

"We're just worried about, if you zoom out across everything we're doing, are these metrics moving in the right direction?" he says. "Why? Because I want us to be so good at marketing that we're terrible at measuring it, that we're doing so many great things that no one knows what's driving it—but it's going up."

Source: Chief Marketer (https://www.eventmarketer.com/article/edgard-cooper-pet-holiday-calendar-event-strategy/) / Source: pet-holiday-calendar.com (https://www.pet-holiday-calendar.com/)