Always On: Which Brands Pet Owners Like

Welcome to Always On. Each week, we’ll dig into a brand or audience trend you need to know about, tapping into Morning Consult Intelligence, our always-on insights platform powered by 15,000 daily surveys across 40+ countries. That means thousands of brands, audience deep dives, and enough fresh data to make your spreadsheets jealous. Sign-up here to get this email sent to you directly every week.

We’ve rolled out a new feature in Morning Consult Intelligence that will make it even easier for you to build out profiles of audiences that are crucial to your business needs. The Audience Builder AI Copilot lets users generate highly-targeted demographics with just a simple description — no complex filters or manual sorting needed. This tool is now available to all Morning Consult clients.

Below, you can see an audience our copilot built of pet owners, with a daily sample of 3,161 respondents. Click the image below to see the tool in action.

Pet owners are a huge audience — nearly 2 out of every 3 consumers in March 2025 said they were pet owners. And it’s a trend that’s been on the uptick in recent years.

With our robust trend data, we can see that pet ownership stayed steady through 2022 (the so-called COVID ownership surge was not as pronounced as the media made it out to be), after which it fell during a time of economic hardship for many owners. Ownership is now up five points compared to early 2022.

While this cohort looks like the general population — many people own pets! — it does tend to be a wealthier audience, who are much more likely to be on social media. It’s worth understanding this group’s brand preferences, which is exactly what we’re going to dive into this week.

Going Deeper: How Pet Owners Feel About Different Brands

Here you can see that PetSmart dominates this category, but competitors are catching up. Let’s take a look at favorability for an established brand like PetSmart and compare it to a newer company, like Chewy.com.

Chewy.com has seen a noticeable rise in favorability and other key brand metrics in the past few years, so much so that it’s closing in on PetSmart’s dominance. Using Morning Consult’s Brand Rankings Exports, we can also see what the standout brands are for pet owners. These brands are ranked by taking the share of pet owners with a favorable opinion of each brand and subtracting the share of all adults with a favorable opinion. Unsurprisingly, pet brands dominate the list.

We track nearly 40 different pet-related brands across treats, food and stores. Morning Consult clients can compare different brands for this audience here. Don’t have access? Get in touch here.

Dog Owners vs. Cat Owners

It’s the time old comparison — cats vs. dogs. While we won’t settle which pet is better in this email (it’s dogs), we can look at how their owners differ. In addition to the pet owner audience we linked above, we also have prebuilt audiences for dog owners and cat owners. These audiences are fairly similar — but there’s a few areas where they differ.

Some differences below may seem small, but given our large sample size — 840,183 dog owners and 626,521 cat owners — we are able to evaluate even small differences.

Cat owners are slightly more likely to be women
53% of U.S. adults who have cats are women, while just 47% are men. The gender divide for dog owners is more evenly split.

Dog owners are three points more likely to identify as Republican
Meanwhile, cat owners are more likely to identify as Democratic or Independent.

Dog owners tend to make more money
51% of dog owners make $50k a year or more, which is three points higher than cat owners, who are more likely to be older and earning less.

Cat owners turn to social media for different reasons
These consumers are more likely to use social media to learn about new topics or read news stories than their canine-owning counterparts.

Dogs are more likely to be owned by younger generations — but not by much
50% of dog owners are Gen Zers or millennials, which make up just 48% of cat owners.

Extra Credit

In this week's extra credit section, we're featuring other specific audiences you should go deep on.

NFL Fans' Favorite Brand: In a moment where American culture is splintering into ever-smaller and harder-to-reach niches, the NFL remains a dominant force. In order to better understand this crucial audience, Morning Consult conducted a study that examines NFL fans' brand preferences and demographic traits.

A Data Deep Dive Into Luxury Consumers: To better understand the demographics and behaviors of luxury consumers we used Morning Consult Intelligence to isolate financial elites who are typically willing to pay more for high-quality items in China, France, India, Mexico and the U.S.

Gen Alpha’s Influence: An in-depth report on how today’s kids’ exposure to technology, media and money influences their family’s shopping habits