Nestlé Purina Growing Consumer Digital Ecosystem With SSO
Nestlé Purina is scaling its single-sign-on (SSO) digital solution to provide an info hub for pet owners and a valuable source of consumer data for Purina.
The company has long had multiple digital properties where consumers can create personal and pet profiles. Previously fragmented, they were forced to enter the same information multiple times, hindering adoption.
The company partnered with AWS last year to develop a SSO solution built on Cognito with an accompanying consumer-facing UI known as Purina Universal Profile (PUP). Using PUP, consumers create a single profile for themselves and their pets that carries across Purina’s full portfolio, Annie Scharenberg, Nestlé Purina U.S. director of architecture and services, told CGT at AWS’s Re:Invent event last week.
Once a profile is created, Purina delivers personalized recommendations that incorporate feeding preferences, activity levels, and breed information, which then dynamically adjust as the pet ages over time.
In addition to providing a hub for consumers to store their pet’s information, participation is incentivized through a loyalty program, and all use cases for the collected data are to support activation.
“One of the things that PUP has enabled is that having this kind of explicit data from consumers allows us to personalize everything we do, especially in mobile apps, where it's typically a little bit easier,” said Scharenberg.
PUP Plans
PUP launched in December 2023 and now covers about 90% of Purina’s consumer data collection, according to Scharenberg. Though it’s currently available only in North America, there are upward of 2 million accounts going through the SSO solution.
Purina’s Petivity smart litter box will also include PUP this year. The bulk of the company’s traffic stems from Purina.com and Petfinder.com, and they’re looking to drive this scale to Petivity.
“Now we can use our larger properties like Purina and Petfinder as almost like a funnel to drive those users down to convert to something like Petivity,” she said. “So we can use our own traffic as an acquisition tactic for newer things in the ecosystem.”
See also: Learn how Nestlé Purina fosters cultures of data collaboration
While PUP is currently only used through Purina’s owned sites, they are starting to have conversations about how they might integrate from a loyalty receipt-scanning perspective and further integrate retail partners into the experience. “But that's a relatively new conversation.”
Scharenberg’s team is fairly lean, with three functions in her department: business, product development, and cloud engineering. After spending several years building their foundation, they're looking to scale the program in 2025.
“We're now at a place where we can start really bringing everything together — with PUP being the center for the consumer, but us looking at everything on the backend and thinking about how we can activate it, how we can leverage it for consumer value, [and] how we can leverage it for business value.”
Generative AI Exploration
Purina is also using generative AI to explore increasing animal adoptions at thousands of pet shelters.
The company owns Petfinder.com, which features 14,000 shelter partners. As non-profits, one of the shelters’ biggest obstacles remains limited resources.
“When generative AI came out, and everyone was excited and thinking about all the different use cases they could leverage it for, Petfinder felt like a really ripe opportunity because it's pretty low risk,” said Scharenberg.
Built on Amazon Bedrock and in market since April, Magic Bio features quick prompt buttons for shelters to optimize adoption listings, including the tone and animal attributes. The generative AI uses the data they’ve already input and, with the click of a button, generates what’s meant to be an engaging listing.
The intent is to help make the process more efficient, consistent, and effective, as it typically takes someone about seven minutes to craft a meaningful pet description, she said.
While they’ve seen a decrease in the amount of time needed to create a description using Magic Bio, it admittedly hasn’t been substantial — a challenge that Scharenberg attributed in part to user discomfort with AI.
Although they’ve received positive verbal feedback, they’re still determining where comfort levels lie. Given the use case’s relatively low risk, Purina intends to keep furthering it and continuing education about its potential benefits.
They’re also exploring how to demonstrate a correlation between an optimized pet description and the performance of the listing, whether that’s a higher interest or adoption rate of a Magic Bio listing.
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