It has been a pleasure for SPSG Consulting to interview Ana Chinarro, CEO of DINGONATURA, a company committed to providing natural pet food, whose commitment to quality and innovation has led it to partner with such emblematic entities as the Spanish Paralympic Committee and Bàsquet Girona. Through these partnerships, DINGONATURA has deployed sponsorship and activation strategies that not only promote its brand, but also reflect its core values of sustainability, social responsibility and love for nature. In this interview, we will explore the motivations behind these partnerships and how the company has leveraged these sports platforms to communicate its commitment to sustainability, thus making a significant difference in the world of sports and beyond. Thank you, Ana, for sharing your vision and knowledge with the readers of the Newsletter of SPSG Consulting, who is proud to advise, in several projects, both the Spanish Paralympic Committee (CPE) and Bàsquet Girona.
DINGONATURA (whose main objective and raison d'être is to provide pets with food with natural ingredients and following the nutritional profiles of the food that the animal or its ancestors would eat in the wild or semi-wild) is present in the sports scene, and especially in the territory of basketball sponsorship through Basquet Girona, as well as with the Spanish Paralympic Committee. To what extent is sponsorship a marketing tool that accompanies the company's strategy?
Dingonatura is still a relatively small company. We are talking about an SME with a turnover of approximately 30,000,000 €. However, it was born more than 20 years ago, specifically in 2001, with its transgressive character; that is, trying to do what nobody had done until then. Natural food is a concept or category that today is not lacking in the human and animal food market, but at that time it had not appeared.
For the first 20 years our focus has been on the quality of our products. We have dedicated ourselves to develop the best natural products for our dogs and cats with the objective of providing them with health through their food, sacrificing commercial opportunities due to our disagreement with some unfounded trends and the scarcity of resources.
Now, once we have done the most difficult part, we have been investing for 2-3 years to make the company and its brands known. We keep our innovative and transgressive culture also in it and we look for actions or communication supports that are aligned with our values.
We love nature, animals and honesty. We are a team very committed to the health and welfare of animals, people and planet. And we feel comfortable when we move forward hand in hand with entities that share with us the culture of effort, self-improvement, teamwork, equality, sustainability and inclusiveness.
In this sense, sport and sports sponsorship, particularly of the Paralympic family and Basket Girona, fit like a glove because, in addition to transmitting values inherent to sport, their social project is absolutely admirable.
We are very proud to be part of both projects in some way and it helps us, without a doubt, to continue building a reputation aligned with our culture.
As we have already mentioned, DINGONATURA is a sponsor of the Spanish Paralympic Committee. Taking into consideration, additionally, that in 2024 the Paralympic and Olympic Games will be held in Paris, what are the main reasons for your partnership with the Spanish Paralympic Committee?
As I mentioned in the previous answer, during the last 3 years and currently, we are allocating resources to achieve brand recognition through different actions. Almost all of them with an important social nuance.
We were in this process when by one of these wonderful coincidences of life, someone around me told me about Susana Gaytan (Deputy General Director of the EPC) and the option of talking to her about a possible sponsorship of a promising team.
Paralympic sport represents better than any other activity all the values that are important to Dingonatura and the people on its team, both in their personal and professional lives. I couldn't believe it. We didn't want to get our hopes up because we suspected, given the group of companies already sponsoring the Paralympics, that it was going to be far out of our reach.
But from the first step we took inside the EPC headquarters to access that first meeting, it was like a love affair. The Paralympic project is one of those things that reconcile you with the human being. Each of the people involved, both the Committee and the athletes themselves, their coaches, federations, etc. give us a constant lesson of integration, dedication and I would even say of rebellion (so necessary).
Yes, indeed it was and is a big bet and effort for Dingonatura, but we could not stop living this movement from the inside trying to contribute our small grain of sand to facilitate the practice of sport for disabled people with all that this means for them, their families and society in general.
Likewise, currently, DINGONATURA is also one of the main sponsors of Bàsquet Girona, a club founded in 2014 by Marc Gasol and which includes more than 30 teams (men's, women's, 3x3, wheelchair basketball, virtual basketball) and whose first men's team participates in the Endesa League. In addition, one of the strategic vectors in which Bàsquet Girona is deepening is that of Sustainability, both Environmental, Social and Economic. Why did DINGONATURA consider partnering with Bàsquet Girona?
We were very impressed by your social project. It is a club with a clear commitment to the environment, as you mentioned, but also to animals and sustainability in general.
For example, the players must collaborate on a recurring basis with some social entity and some of them choose animal shelters.
On the other hand, basketball is a sport that is normally enjoyed with the family, there is no verbal or physical violence in the games or in the media, and it breathes sportsmanship wherever you look.
Finally, the Gasol brothers have a Foundation dedicated to fighting childhood obesity. This is something, obviously, closely related to nutrition, which is what we are dedicated to, and it is also in our discourse and our purpose to prevent obesity, in this case, in our dogs and cats, whose incidence is growing exponentially. Of course, I do not mean by this that both fronts are at the same level of importance (children and dogs/cats), but there is a parallelism that has to do with the humanization of these animals by many people.
To really take advantage of the investment in sponsorship, it is necessary to design and implement a consistent activation plan, aimed at different target audiences: current customers, potential customers, current consumers, Retail, employees, shareholders, media, institutions, etc. What are the main strategic lines in the activation of sponsorship that DINGONATURA implements both with the Spanish Paralympic Committee and with Basquet Girona?
They are two very different sponsorships.
With Basquet Girona we have the opportunity to communicate directly with the public, although in a more local or regional geographic scope. For us it is important because we are very close and we have an important market in Catalonia.
What we usually do with them are activations during the games to make the timeouts or breaks more entertaining and we prepare a contest/sweepstakes with a solidarity prize for the winner to give x kilos of our Solidary food to a shelter of his or her choice. We also give out merchandising and samples of food and sweets.
With Paralímpicos we focus more on activations with a more social component. A good example is the visit we made this past summer to adolescents admitted to the mental health unit of the Doce de Octubre Hospital in Madrid with a blind triathlete and his guide dog. These visits are part of the INSPIRADOG program of the Cátedra Animales y Sociedad (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos) funded by Fundación Dingonatura.
The sponsorship of Paralympics gives us national and international visibility. Dingonatura markets in some 20 countries and we have an ambitious international expansion plan. In many countries, the first time they will see our brand will be associated with Paralympics..
One of the aspects that DINGONATURA promotes the most are sustainability issues, both environmental and social. Could you tell us more about the different activations related to sustainability and sponsorship that DINGONATURA develops? To what extent is activation "in the key of sustainability" relevant now and will it be relevant in the future?
In fact, it is something that is in our own DNA as a company and has a lot to do with the sum of the commitment of its team members, especially the management team.
In every area of our business we analyze and try to minimize negative impacts on our environment. We could go on at length on this point of sustainability and social commitment, but I will share just a few representative examples.
At the end of 2019 we inaugurated a new factory in a town in the so-called "Empty Spain". It is the most sustainable and cleanest pet foods factory in southern Europe. It runs on LNG as the only source of energy, so far the least polluting known fuel. It does not incorporate gases into the atmosphere; we clean them and convert them into odorless water vapor that is expelled through a single chimney that does the cleaning work. We also recover a cattle watering pond for its primary use that serves as a fire water tank. We work with local ingredients, except for 3 of the more than 80 that we use.
Por otro lado, desde 2018 formamos parte de la Pet Sustainability Coalition (PSC). Fuimos la primera empresa española en ser miembro de esta coalición internacional que empuja a las empresas de nuestro sector a ser cada día más sostenibles en el sentido más amplio de la palabra.
También estamos en las listas PETA americana y europea de empresas que no experimentan con animales.
Objetivo papel zero, envases monomaterial reciclables, ingredientes que exigen poca agua para su obtención, etc son también parte de nuestro camino hacia un Dingonatura cada vez más sostenible.
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