The Breed Decision: How Battersea is Disrupting Misinformed Breed Choices

Scroll. Click. Fall in love. Contact breeder. Too often prospective owners fixate on a specific breed based on how they looked on Instagram, not for how they'd fit into their lives. This mismatch can lead to behavioural challenges, owner struggles and, ultimately, relinquishment to an organisation like Battersea.

Battersea is on a mission to help more dogs and cats than ever before, not only through rescue, but by preventing pets from needing rescue in the first place. As 35% of people who are ‘really struggling’ with dog ownership admit they regret not researching their breed more thoroughly before acquiring their pet, the need for preventative intervention has never been clearer. To tackle this at the source, Battersea launched The Breed Decision campaign, an innovative, behaviour-change campaign designed to reach prospective owners at the critical moment of decision-making. Partnering with Gumtree, we disrupted the dog acquisition journey by delivering targeted, breed-specific messaging directly to users browsing listings. We worked with Gumtree to unlock on-platform first-party data and designed a measurement framework to help us understand the behavioural impact of the campaign in a way that typical marketing metrics wouldn’t allow. The impact was significant. The campaign successfully shifted behaviour, encouraging prospective owners to conduct deeper research before contacting breeders and prompting them to consider the welfare needs of the animal beyond the aesthetics.