MAM
All about cats and dogs and their Indian pet parents
MUMBAI: Indians are increasingly welcoming animals into their home. That’s something which is more than reflected in major metros and urban areas where you find pet owners walking their furry friends on the sidewalk at dusk or at dawn.
A global pet parent survey by pet care and nutrition company Mars Petcare totally reaffirmed this. 20,000 pet (cats and dogs) parents were contacted – 1,000 of them from India – and two thirds of them expressed that their feline or canine companions are the most important thing in their lives.
For Gen Zs and millennials, pets are companions who provide unconditional love, alleviate stress, and make great companions to bond with. More than 64 per cent of young dog owners and 60 per cent of young cat owners in India reported that their pets helped reduce stress and anxiety. These numbers reveal that pets are an integral part of their life. Pet adoption starts at least three months or younger, with 67 per cent of them being puppies and 70 per cent, kittens.
The survey reveals that there’s still a journey ahead in raising awareness about adoption. Only six per cent of puppies and four per cent of kittens are adopted from shelters, with 17 per cent of puppies and 10 per cent of kittens being acquired through breeders and, maximum, through pet shops, with 23 per cent of puppies and 19 per cent of kittens. This indicates a significant opportunity to promote adoption and responsible pet ownership, potentially leading to a more compassionate pet care culture in India.
Mars Petcare India managing director Salil Murthy acknowledged that a new generation of Indian pet parents- especially young Indians- are adopting pets in record numbers and are also prioritising the emotional and mental benefits these relationships bring. “At Mars Petcare, we are obsessed with pet parents and are always listening and learning from them. The Mars Global Pet Parent Study reflects our commitment to learn and share awareness about how pet ownership is evolving worldwide. It’s no longer ownership; it’s become a lifelong relationship. India is no different. Just as they care about their own health, Gen Z is equally committed to the health and nutrition of their pets,” he added. “We ensure every product in our portfolio provides 100 per cent complete and balanced nutrition wherever pets are. Beyond nutrition, we aim to ease pet parents’ challenges and build a better world for pets. Our initiatives like building better cities for pets, organising national adoption weekends, deploying mobile shelters across key metros, and partnering with animal welfare organisations in multiple cities are a testament to our commitment to this purpose.”
Globally, Mars Petcare’s survey revealed similar trends in pet ownership, with 56 per cent of people worldwide identifying as pet parents, and nearly half of them being first-time owners. Around 37 per cent of global pet parents view their pets as the most important thing in their life, showing that this deep bond between people and pets extends beyond borders. With insights like these, Mars Petcare continues to innovate and evolve its offerings to meet the needs of pet parents around the world.
Conducted over 30 days in early 2024, Mars Petcare’s study surveyed 20,000 pet parents across 21 countries, including Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Turkey, South Africa, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and India. This study—the largest of its kind—reveals how pets profoundly impact lives worldwide and the evolving priorities of today’s pet parents.
Following are some of the highlights of the survey”
Pet Ownership is Expanding and Evolving
* Growing pet ownership globally: Over half (56 per cent) of respondents globally are pet parents; 47 per cent being first-time owners. In India, first-time pet parents rise to 69 per cent
* Pet prioritisation: Gen Z and millennials lead a more emotional approach to pet ownership, with 47 per cent of global Gen Z dog owners and 43 per cent of cat owners saying their pets are “the most important part of their lives.” In India, this number is a remarkable 66 per cent for dog and cat owners.
* Younger pets for younger generations: Globally, 70 per cent of puppy owners and 72 per cent of kitten owners are Gen Z or millennials, reflecting their desire to start early bonds.
Pet Parents’ Satisfaction and Challenges
* High satisfaction with pets’ impact: Globally, 37 per cent of pet parents feel their pets are central to their lives, with India showing an even stronger bond at 68 per cent. Dog owners value unconditional love (42 per cent in India) and family completeness (40 per cent), while cat owners highlight entertainment (43 per cent) and stress relief (41 per cent).
* Guilt around leaving pets alone: One-third of global dog owners (33 per cent) and 32 per cent of Indian dog owners feel guilty about leaving pets alone. For cat owners, this rises to 38 per cent in India.
Barriers to Pet Ownership and Pet Friendliness
* Key barriers: Globally, challenges include unsuitable living conditions and the commitment level. In India, emotional pain from pet loss (23 per cent) is a top reason for not owning a dog, while living conditions and furniture concerns impact cat ownership.
* Pet-friendliness of neighborhoods: While 42 per cent globally find their neighborhoods pet-friendly, India ranks higher, with 56 per cent viewing it positively. However, nine per cent of Indian respondents still hold negative sentiments about having pets in their neighborhood.
* Pet adoption: Most pets are acquired through friends, family, or breeders, with minimal adoption rates. In India, 23 per cent of dogs and 19 per cent of cats come from pet shops, while adoption rates remain low at six per cent for dogs and four per cent for cats.
Digital
GUEST COLUMN: How AI is restructuring distributor and retailer motivation models
From incentives to intelligence, AI is redefining how brands engage channel partners
MUMBAI: Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how brands engage with their most critical yet often overlooked stakeholders: distributors, retailers, and last-mile influencers. For Abhinav Jain, co-founder and CEO of Almonds Ai, this shift marks a fundamental departure from traditional, transaction-led incentive models toward behaviour-driven, data-intelligent ecosystems. In this piece, Jain examines how AI is enabling brands to decode partner motivations, predict engagement patterns, and deliver personalised, scalable experiences—ultimately redefining channel relationships from transactional exchanges to long-term growth partnerships.
Across many sectors, there is increasing recognition that motivating those who bring products to market (distributors, retailers, last-mile influencers) poses a growing challenge.
Brands continue to invest significant marketing and digital resources to consumers, yet in many countries and the vast majority of emerging economies, these types of consumer-focused investment areas have had little impact on ultimate product delivery. Rather, it is still the case that traditional retail continues to make up most products sold.
So why is it that the systems built around motivating these channels have yet to evolve?
For decades, distributor and retailer engagement revolved around static schemes – quarterly targets, volume-based rewards, and occasional trade promotions. These programs were designed around transactions, not behaviour. The assumption was simple: if incentives increase, performance will follow.
Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, the definition of performance is being challenged.
With the development of artificial intelligence, businesses can move beyond simply creating loyalty based on transactional-based models and toward models built on behaviours, the behaviours of channel partners that are intrinsic to their motivations in engaging with particular brands. As a result, the means by which businesses develop relationships within their distribution network are starting to evolve; thus, ultimately changing how brands interact with those within their distribution network.
Assessing engagement: Transitioning from transactional- to behavioural intelligence
Traditional loyalty systems refer to transactional activity (sales data). Although this data is valuable and important, it only provides a partial view of engagement across the channel partner.
For example, a retailer may have a high frequency of sales of a product, but their lack of engagement with the manufacturer would not reflect that they have true loyalty toward that brand. Conversely, a retailer who actively participates in training programmes, acts as brand advocates, and is engaged in learning with the supplier would exhibit more profound levels of loyalty but would have been invisible based on historical incentive programmes.
Artificial intelligence allows for the identification of behaviours that help to address this gap. Brands are able to use a variety of engagement data points, participate in learning programs, respond to communications, redeem behaviour and track platform use behaviour in order to identify motivation through behaviour.
McKinsey has stated that companies that leverage advanced analytics for their sales and distribution functions can achieve as much as a 15-20 per cent increase in productivity due to increased awareness of their behavioural trends throughout their networks.
This visibility of behavioural patterns within channel ecosystems can be transformational to brands as they can now view how partners engage on their path to purchasing products, instead of just measuring the sales revenue generated by those purchases.
Predicting motivations, not just measuring performance
Possibly, the largest contribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to helping brands engage with partners via channel ecosystems is its ability to predict future engagement versus simply measuring past performance.
Traditionally, brands only realised that a partner was disengaged (not likely to purchase products) once their sales performance had already declined. By then, the brand would have to use significant amounts of incentives or aggressive promotional activities to recovery their partner’s engagement level.
AI models can help organisations to detect early signs that a partner is becoming disengaged, such as declining participation in learning modules, declining interaction via the platform, or slower reward redemption rates. These indicators can help organisations to proactively engage with their partners before their sales performance begins to decline.
The practical application of AI and predictive analytics gives brands the ability to re-engage with their partners prior to their sales performance declines. For example, instead of developing and implementing broad-reaching incentive programs that provide a “one size fits all” incentive to all partners in an ecosystem, brands are able to develop targeted, engaging re-engagement programmes. This is how personalisation can be done on a large scale, such as across global distribution and retail networks.
The vast majority of distributor and retailer channels have thousands, if not millions, of individual channel partners. Historically, providing personalisation to such a large number of businesses has not been feasible.
However, with the advent of AI, personalisation at scale is becoming a reality.
Brands can now create tailored engagement journeys for all their partners, based on their partner profiles, through some combination of machine learning models and behavioural segmentation. For example, high-performing distributors might receive higher levels of leadership-based recognition and greater incentives to continue to grow. Emerging retailers, on the other hand, might be supported with training, onboarding rewards, and measurable performance milestones.
The shift towards personalisation of partner engagement echoes the direction that consumer marketing is already moving towards.
According to Salesforce’s report, over 70 per cent of customers expect personalisation in the way that brands engage with them. As such, there is a growing expectation for B2B ecosystems to have these same types of expectations from their channel partners.
Gamification and continuous engagement
AI is also radically changing how brands will engage with their channel partners through the use of gamification.
Many traditional incentive-based contests and leaderboards would spark temporary engagement among their participants, but they struggled to sustain engagement over time. With the use of AI, gamification mechanics are evolving dynamically based on historical and evolving participation patterns by their channel partners.
Challenges, rewards, and recognition structures can be modified continuously in order to sustain engagement with all of a brand’s partner segments. This will provide a greater opportunity to move away from episodic campaigns towards ongoing, continuous engagement experiences.
When channel partners receive motivation as part of their daily business activities through recognition, learning, and tracking their performance, long-term loyalty will be achieved.
Aligning motivation to broader impact
There is a growing trend within the channel ecosystem to integrate sustainability and socially responsible behaviours into the channel partner programmes of brands.
Increasingly, brands are motivating their partners to use sustainable practices in their operations, participate in sustainable practices like sustainability-related knowledge programmes, or promote products that are in line with their sustainability objectives.
Brands can use AI to monitor and measure these types of behaviours and incorporate them into their incentive frameworks so that brands can align their commercial objectives with broader social and environmental outcomes.
A shift in the way brands view their channel partners
AI is having the most significant impact on the way that brands are now viewing their channel partners, as it relates to the underlying philosophy of those fundamental relationships.
For the past several decades, many brands have viewed their channel partners as intermediaries in the supply chain. More and more brands are now beginning to view their channel partners as key ‘partners-in-growth,’ and their actions can have a direct impact on market performance.
In fact, all the channel ecosystems are using behavioural engagement platforms to design new models that reward not just transactional behaviour, but also create continuous engagement journeys for their partners, where their partners can receive recognition for their participation, learning, and continued engagement, thereby reinforcing long-term loyalty to the brand.
The future: Intelligent channel ecosystems
As we consider what the next phase of channel engagement may look like, many believe that it will be based on intelligent ecosystems, using AI to continuously monitor and adjust the engagement strategies used to engage their channel partners, in real time and based on the behaviours of those partners.
For brands operating in complex distribution networks, the ability to perform well will be determined both by whether products are available to their customers, as well as by the enthusiasm, expertise, and loyalty shown from each channel partner that represents the brand each and every day that they are working on behalf of the brand.
While AI clearly does not eliminate the human aspect of a brand’s relationship with its channel partners, it does allow brands to better understand and nurture that relationship.
In markets where the last mile will determine whether a sale is made, how one leverages the intelligence gained by using AI will ultimately be the difference between gaining a new, sustainable competitive advantage versus losing one.
