It was a carefully designed marketing collaboration.
zooplus France and a local football team, OL Lyonnes, co-created an experience-based brand partnership, the “Match 2 Wouf”, transforming a sports event into a branded pet inclusive experience.
For years, pet marketing has been heavily focused on:
🔸Pet food
🔸Vet products
🔸Pet accessories
But this campaign shows a new direction:
Brands are now co-creating shared experiences where pets and their humans are the heroes.
Such partnership work pretty well because all partners benefit from similar values.
The stadium became:
🔸A live brand environment
🔸A social media content generator
🔸A new community platform
Zooplus moved beyond e-commerce and positioned itself as:
🔸A lifestyle enabler
🔸A supporter of a pet inclusive society
🔸A brand that understands modern “dog parents”
For OL Lyonnes, the partnership helped:
🔸Attract families with pets
🔸Create media differentiation
🔸Strengthen emotional fan engagement
🔸Generate viral visibility
And this is what makes the campaign different from ordinary sports sponsorship. The pet itself became part of the event experience. That changes the role of sponsorship from passive visibility to active participation.
Pet marketing collaborations work especially well because animals naturally increase:
• Emotional engagement
• Social sharing
• Media attention
• Audience memorability
A football match with dogs in the stadium is:
• Visually unusual
• Emotionally positive
• Highly shareable on social media platforms
• Perfect for television coverage.
The campaign also reinforces the shift in consumer behaviour:
Pets are family members.
Modern consumers (especially millennials and Gen Z) want:
* Pet friendly cafés
* Pet inclusive travel & workplaces
* Leisure activities involving pets
And here is the marketing lesson.
The “Match 2 Wouf” model is very scalable.
I see similar collaborations could emerge between:
→ Airlines + pet brands
→ Hotels + veterinary companies
→ Festivals + pet insurance brands
→ Tourism boards + pet travel platforms
In today’s crowded battle for consumer attention, brands can either compete with another advertisement or create experiences people genuinely want to share 🧡
Pic. Sportmag
LinkedIn original post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/angels-bosch
