Many Americans experienced a sense of loneliness in 2020 that they had never felt before when COVID forced everyone to stay home. And never before did they spend more on their pets. The American Pet Products Association estimated record-high outlays that year of $99 billion, including everything from food to vet bills, CNBC reported at the time.
Spending on pandemic puppies reflects a broader relationship, research suggests. University of Alberta’s Tim Derksen and Kyle B. Murray and Monash University’s Davide Orazi and Satheesh Seenivasan establish a link between experiencing loneliness and spending on things to reduce it, including pets.
Through a series of studies, the researchers explored the persistence of the loneliness effect on spending and the implications for marketers. In one study, the researchers tapped into NielsenIQ Consumer Panel Data for 2010 through 2018 from Chicago Booth’s Kilts Center for Marketing. The data cover a wide range of products, categories, retail channels, stores, and geographic markets in the United States.
They narrowed the data set to households with pets, then further into households according to the lifecycle stages defined in the set—young singles, couple without children, households with children, empty nesters, singles with children, and old singles—specifically bifurcating the data into households with lifecycles that held steady and those that experienced the loss of a partner. Losing a partner showed up as households that transitioned from married to single. This transition served as a proxy for big life events such as divorce or the death of a family member that typically cause loneliness, the researchers contend.
Research finds that spending on pets—and particularly on dogs, which are perceived as faithful companions—increased among households with pets after a negative life event such as divorce or the death of a family member.
They analyzed data on pet spending for each household that shrank, identifying 594 households that may have experienced a significant negative event between 2011 and 2016. The researchers find that families in this situation spent significantly more on pets after the life change and for at least two more years. Lonely households specifically spent more on dogs than on all other pets—almost 16 percent in the year of a negative life event. People see dogs as better companions and more like humans, the researchers theorize.
In another study, this time on Facebook, they tested whether lonely people were also more likely to click on ads for pet products. Implementing a Facebook ad campaign over four days in April 2023, they showed users one of two messages. Some saw, “Give your dog all the love it deserves, inside and out.” Others saw, “Loneliness is common these days. Feel less lonely by giving your dog all the love it deserves, inside and out.” Both ads included a link to buy a nutritional supplement. The ads targeted US residents over the age of 35 who indicated an interest in dogs. The researchers find that people who saw the message about loneliness were more than twice as likely to click on the ad than those who saw the other message.
On the basis of the findings, they suggest pet-care marketers dial up the anthropomorphic appeal of dogs—although they caution against being insensitive and targeting people who have recently lost a loved one or experienced a similar traumatic event. More generally, framing a product or service being offered as a remedy for loneliness can dramatically increase interest in it, they argue.
Tim Derksen, Kyle B. Murray, Davide Orazi, and Satheesh Seenivasan, “I Need You to Need Me: Loneliness, Anthropomorphism, and the Persistence of Compensatory Consumption Effects,” Working paper, June 2024.
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