PET CARE
MARKETING.

Nobody buys pet food the way they buy biscuits. They buy it the way a new parent buys formula: after reading, asking, worrying and reading again. India's pet parents are mostly first-timers, they treat their animals as family, and they go online with a question before they go to a shop with a wallet. Pet care marketing comes down to being the brand that answered the question well.

It is a market growing at about 20% a year. Wazir Advisors values India's pet care market at about ₹10,300 crore in 2025 and expects ₹25,000 to ₹26,000 crore by 2030, with pet food 59% of it, services 24%, accessories 9% and healthcare 7%. Redseer counted about 32 million pets in Indian homes in FY24 and found that the pet parents it surveyed spend about ₹50,000 a year on their animals, 5% to 8% of household income. Euromonitor's count, 38.5 million pets in 2023, up from 22.1 million in 2018, has dogs at 87% and cats as the fastest-growing kind of pet.

Why pet care is its own industry, and where our experience comes from

Pet care looks like three of our other industries at once, and that is why we understand it. The buyer behaves like the maternity and fertility audiences we have served for Motherhood Hospitals and Nova IVF: anxious, research-led, loyal once trust is earned. The product is sold like food, with labels, ingredients and claims, which is our food and beverage work in another aisle. And the professional at the centre, the vet, is bound by an ethics code that reads much like the one that governs the doctors we work with in healthcare.

The buyer looks like this in numbers. Mars Petcare's global pet parent study found that 69% of Indian pet parents are first-time pet parents, and 68% say their pet is central to their lives, against 37% worldwide. A later Mars survey found 79% of Indian pet owners say their pet helps their mental wellbeing. A first-time parent of any kind Googles everything, and the brand that explains calmly, with a vet's name attached, is the brand that gets the second order.

What does pet care marketing cover?

Where are pet products sold in India?

Pet care is still bought mostly offline. Redseer put online at under 10% of the market in FY24, and in its survey of pet parents about 20% of accessory purchases and 16% of food and treat purchases were made online, which means the pet shop, the vet's counter and the kirana are still where most of the money changes hands. But the online share is where the growth is: Supertails, one of the pet e-commerce specialists, grew revenue 68% to ₹108.3 crore in FY25, and the quick-commerce apps have added pet aisles that put a bag of food on a doorstep in minutes.

So a pet brand's marketing has to work in both worlds. Online, that is listing images, ingredient pages, reviews and advertising on the specialist and marketplace apps. Offline, it is the vet, the groomer and the pet shop owner, who recommend what they trust, and who are reached by education, samples and a sales team's visit rather than by a reel. We plan both into one calendar.

Which rules does a pet brand in India have to follow?

Pet care has fewer rules than medicine and more than most people assume. These are the ones that shape what a brand can say and do.

Selling animals. The Pet Shop Rules 2018%20Rules,%202018.pdf), made under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, define a pet shop to include online platforms, require anyone trading in pet animals to be registered with the State Animal Welfare Board, and bar the sale of un-weaned animals and sales to minors. The Dog Breeding and Marketing Rules 2017 require breeders to be registered and bar selling pups under eight weeks old or displaying them in public for immediate sale. In December 2023 the Animal Welfare Board of India wrote to every state that, except Maharashtra, none had reported progress on implementing the two sets of rules, so enforcement is uneven, but the law is clear. Meta's community standards remove content that attempts to buy, sell or trade live non-endangered animals unless it comes from a legitimate brick-and-mortar business, website, brand or rehoming shelter. We do not make "puppies for sale" content, for anyone.

Vets. The Veterinary Council of India's code of ethics, in force since 1992, bars a vet from advertising that claims a superiority they have not earned, or from letting their name be used in publicity that draws attention to their skill. It allows a formal announcement only for six events, such as starting, moving or resuming a practice, and bars advertising through the publicity material of firms the vet is connected with. A vet can educate the public; putting a vet's name and skill at the centre of your advertising is what the code warns against. At the end of March 2024 India had 87,914 registered veterinary practitioners and 67,889 veterinary institutions, and a clinic's marketing works the same way a hospital's does: factual information about services, hours and the team, education that does not solicit, and no guarantees.

Pet food. India has no pet food regulator in the way FSSAI regulates human food; the Delhi High Court confirmed in April 2026 that the Food Safety and Standards Act covers only food for human consumption. The Bureau of Indian Standards' IS 11968:2019 for dog and cat food is voluntary, and imported pet food containing material of animal origin needs a sanitary import permit from the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying. Every pack must carry the declarations the Legal Metrology (Packaged Commodities) Rules 2011 require, as amended in 2021: the maker or importer, the product's common name, net quantity, month and year of manufacture, retail price, unit sale price and consumer care details. Prepared pet food carries 18% GST, unchanged by the September 2025 rate changes, which the industry is lobbying to lower. A brand that meets the BIS standard voluntarily has a claim worth making, if it can show it.

Supplements and medicines. Veterinary drugs fall under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act and CDSCO's veterinary division, so a supplement that claims to treat, cure or prevent a condition has crossed into drug territory and needs a licence. We write supplement claims as support, not treatment, and ask for the evidence behind each one.

Claims and creators. The ASCI Code requires every claim of fact to be capable of substantiation, and under the Consumer Protection Act 2019 the CCPA can fine the manufacturer or endorser of a misleading advertisement up to ₹10 lakh, and ₹50 lakh for a repeat. Creator posts need one of ASCI's accepted labels, "Ad", "Sponsored", "Collaboration" and the rest, placed upfront. ASCI requires creators posting about health and nutrition to be qualified, and we apply the same test to advice about animals. Pet accounts are a creator category of their own on Instagram, and the brands that work with them well brief the human, not the dog.

What works on social media for pet brands?

The pet as narrator. The best pet content speaks from the animal's point of view, because that is how pet parents already talk about them, and it lets a brand be funny without being flippant about a worry. "Is my dog okay?" is the question underneath most searches, and content that answers it, with a vet's name on it, is the content we would build first. Routines and rituals: the morning walk, the feeding time, the grooming day. The honest side: shedding, teething, the vet visit nobody enjoys. Adoption and rehoming stories, which Meta allows and which the audience loves, never sales. And the calendar: World Rabies Day on 28 September, National Dog Day on 26 August, the monsoon and the Diwali fireworks season, when a brand that helps anxious animals and their people earns more loyalty than any discount.

Our rule from every other industry holds here too: measure the action, not the applause. A pet reel gets likes from people who will never own a pet. Saves, shares to a family group, replies from someone with a six-week-old puppy and the first order are the signals that matter, and our co-founder Niraj's argument for destroying the like button applies here with extra force.

How we measure pet care marketing

First orders and repeat orders, because pet food is a subscription whether or not it is sold as one. Marketplace rank and rating by listing. Bookings for grooming and consultations. Direction requests and calls from a clinic's Google profile. Searches for the brand name after a campaign. And the questions people ask in comments and messages, which tell us what the next month's content should answer. The monthly report leads with sales and repeat rate, then what we are changing.

What it costs

We quote against the brief, because a treat brand launching on two apps and a veterinary chain with eleven clinics are different jobs. The quote covers strategy, content, shoots, creator management, campaigns and reporting; ad budgets, marketplace and quick-commerce advertising, creator fees and shoot extras such as animal handlers are paid separately, and GST at the standard rate of 18% applies to agency fees. Send the brief with your products or your clinics, and we will tell you what we would do first.