Banfield

A research-led product vision for Banfield and Mars, built on a five-year retention model their leadership called very solid.

Research, six insights, eight principles, and a prototyped service.

One shift organized the strategy: move Banfield from one-off, transactional visits toward an ongoing relationship with the pet parent.

That shift became a three-part product framework. Be Informed: a home screen personalized to each pet, and answers that come from a vet rather than a stranger online. Take Action: reminders and rewards tied directly to the retention math, a plan renewal before it lapses, the next exam, a medication on its way. Stay Engaged: a social layer for the parts of pet parenting Banfield never touched, nearby friends, playdates, local parks, a community Q&A that vets answer.

Banfield is the largest general veterinary practice in the US, with more than 1,000 hospitals. Its paid plan, the Optimum Wellness Plan, already had 2.4 million members. But most of them felt little value from a plan they were paying for, and the relationship belonged to the hospital and the vet rather than to the brand.

Banfield spent about $700K a year winning new clients and almost nothing keeping the 2.4 million it already had. Its own math made that a strange choice: one point of retention was worth $21M.

Another loyalty app would not fix it. Banfield's relationship with pet parents ran through clinic visits: occasional, transactional, one appointment at a time. One more app would be opened twice a year around a vet visit.

The work was to make Banfield present in the parts of pet parenting that happen every day: the walk, the birthday post, the 2 a.m. question, the friend down the street with a dog the same age. And to make the retention math real without ever putting a price tag in front of the parent.

The work ran on an explicit research plan: stakeholder workshops, a four-day diary study with eighteen pet parents, and ten 45-minute interviews. Nothing was designed until the research had produced something to design against.

Synthesis turned that into six insights about how pet parents live with their animals. The six became eight design principles, precise enough to hold a product team to. Every screen in the vision traces back to one of them, which is what let the team defend each screen when the vision reached leadership.

Experience design and research, alongside a small team at Fantasy, November 2021 to July 2022. The discovery that built the retention case. The synthesis that produced the insights and principles. The information architecture and flows that followed from them, and the wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes that made the service tangible.

The deliverables were the argument: journey and service maps for how the whole thing would work, flows a stakeholder could click through, and a five-year ROI model that gave the design a number to stand on. Banfield and Mars leadership, including their CMO and VP of Product Marketing, signed off on it.

Take Action lived closest to the ROI model. A Health Hero badge, unlocked by bringing a pet in for its next exam, turned a retention metric into something a parent would want to do. Beside it sat plain reminders, a medication arriving today, a wellness plan about to expire, that made the app useful on a day nothing was wrong.

Stay Engaged mapped nearby pet parents and matched playdates. The friend down the street became part of what keeps a pet parent with Banfield.