Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 12
Regularly exercised dogs can collar 
premium discounts for their owners
Taking your dog for a walk could cut the cost of future 
pet insurance premiums, with the launch of a new 
product powered by a collar-mounted doggy fitness 
tracker.
In the latest development in the world of 
‘insurtech’, insurer MoreThan has launched a part-
nership with PitPat – the dog world’s equivalent of 
the FitBit – offering cash rewards of up to £100 for 
owners who regularly exercise their pet.
From next month, customers receiving a new 
MoreThan pet insurance quotation for a dog will be 
given the option of signing up to PitPat Life.
At £4 a month, the subscription service includes 
the collar-mounted PitPat activity monitor which 
tracks the pet’s exercise levels via a linked smart-
phone app. This will devise a personalised daily 
exercise goal based on your dog’s age, weight and 
breed.
Users accumulate points for achieving these goals 
and completing tasks such as weighing their dog 
regularly. PitPat said that if dogs and their owners 
accomplished the exercise goal every day for a year, 
the maximum reward of £100 could be unlocked.
Points can be exchanged for perks, including 
money off dog food, a caricature of your pet, or put 
towards renewing their MoreThan insurance policy.
Points are not rewarded for exceeding the goal 
and doing more exercise than necessary, as this can 
be detrimental to a dog’s health.
The latest innovation to hit the UK’s £1.2bn pet 
insurance market, MoreThan hopes the venture 
could cut the numbers of podgy pooches.
Fitness trackers enter the pet insurance market
By Alexandra Howlett
Source
: Petr David Josek/AP/Shutterstock.

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INTRODUCTION
Introduction 
A recent report by McKinsey predicts that after decades of expansion, global economic 
growth will slow dramatically as the world’s population ages. The data suggest that the rate 
of gross domestic product will decline by 40 per cent over the next 50 years, and it is feared 
that today’s feeble growth rates, collapsed oil prices and low interest rates may mark the 
start of a new era of austerity and low growth. However, the bright spot in the McKinsey 
work is that it concludes that with pro-market reforms and radical technological innova-
tion, growth may accelerate again. Economic growth can be driven by creativity and, above 
all else, by innovation (cited in Tett, 2015 ). The priority for companies to compete through 
innovation has probably never been higher. 
Certainly, many companies are experiencing the squeeze between investor demands for 
sustained earnings growth and shrinking and fiercely contested post-recessionary markets. It 
is a problem that, in the past, marketing has tended to fixate on serving and retaining current 
customers, which has been reinforced by company rewards and incentives that emphasise 
short-term market share and profitability. Marketing should be central to corporate growth, 
but it is in danger of being marginalised in important decisions about growth strategy – some 
see marketing and sales only as the people responsible for selling what is produced and hit-
ting volume targets. Instead, marketing’s real role is to contribute to a firm’s growth through 
better anticipation of market opportunities and evaluation of risks, tighter linking of tech-
nological possibilities with market concepts and faster adjustment to shifting market needs 
and competitive moves ( Day, 2003 ). The key has become competing through innovation . 
There are many factors that encourage a company to innovate. These factors include 
internal pressures to exploit existing and new technologies to the full, together with the 
desire to use the organisation’s resources, its assets and capabilities, as effectively as possible. 
‘Happy and healthy dogs lead longer and richer 
lives,’ said Andrew Moore, director of pet claims at 
MoreThan. A qualified vet, Mr Moore added: ‘The 
love we have for our canine friends means it can be 
easy to overfeed them, with our research showing 50 
per cent of dogs are overweight due to being overin-
dulged by their owner.’ 
PitPat’s brand ambassador Rory the Vet – who 
stars in CBBC’s The Pet Factor with more than 30,000 
Instagram followers – said he saw more pets suffer-
ing from obesity, which can affect everything from a 
dog’s heart to their spine, than anything else within 
his work. 
Thought to be the first pet insurance product of 
its kind, dog owners – and people without a pet – can 
already take out policies linked to health-tracking 
apps from providers including Vitality to receive dis-
counts on life and health insurance. 
PitPat’s founder Andy Nowell described the new 
product as ‘a bit like Vitality, but for dogs’. 
While the link up with MoreThan is new, the 
PitPat activity monitor has been on the market 
for three years and has evolved considerably, Mr 
Nowell said. 
‘We realised that dogs roll in poo. The monitor is 
now waterproof, has a battery life of a year and the 
Velcro is replaceable,’ he added. 
By the end of next year, PitPat Life hopes to 
have 50,000 members and has already expanded to 
Denmark. However, until Mr Nowell has put a Pit-
Pat activity monitor on all 8.9m dogs in the UK, he 
won’t think of branching out into the cat insurance 
market. 
However, he said he was aware of some particu-
larly enthusiastic cat owners who had purchased a 
monitor and selected a small breed of dog. 
Source : from ‘Fitness trackers enter the pet insurance market’, Financial Times , 27/03/19 (Howlett, A.).
Discussion questions
1 
What innovations are discussed here?
2 
What could be sources of innovation for an insurance company such as MoreThan?

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