What your brand can learn from a dog show

We are living through a golden age of faking it: the AI stunt that earns a news cycle and dissolves the moment you press on it, the activation that is shared for five minutes and forgotten, and the commercial that’s more about the celebrity starring in it than the brand. Merriam-Webster named slop the word of 2025. It’s the equivalent of an artificial sweetener; surface-level buzz at best, no substance beneath.

So, for the sake of timeline cleansing and inspiration, let’s talk about one of my favorite topics, dogs, the things they do, and dog shows.

Every year, several million people watch dogs trot around a ring in televised dog shows. Viewers pick favorites, develop strong opinions about terriers, and text their family 11:00 p.m. about an old English sheepdog named Graeme like something important is at stake. This year was Westminster’s 150th anniversary. I went and what I saw wasn’t really about dogs. It was about what happens when you give people something genuinely worth showing up for.

PARTICIPATION IS WHAT MATTERS

Human beings are not wired for passive consumption. We are wired for shared experience. Attention is like a rental that depreciates in value the moment the ad spend runs out whereas participation compounds.

At the Crufts dog show, the British counterpart to Westminster, presenter Claudia Winkleman could barely get through an interview without stopping mid-sentence to stare adoringly at a golden retriever. The clips of this love gaze spread everywhere. People who had never heard of Crufts shared the clips. Nobody engineered that. They just gave her a microphone, put her near some dogs, and trusted that if the love was real, people would find their way to it.

When you give someone a genuine role rather than a passive seat, the thing stops being something they watched and becomes something they were part of. That’s a different relationship entirely. That’s brand love, and it doesn’t show up in a post-campaign report. It shows up three years later when someone is still telling the story.

START WITH WHAT PEOPLE CARE ABOUT

At Johannes Leonardo, we like to work with brands that understand this and aren’t asking how to get people’s attention. They’re asking something harder: Is there something real here that people would make their own?

Westminster has been asking this question since 1877. The answer has always been the same: Start with something people genuinely care about, give it a stage, and get out of the way. Don’t engineer fake participation. Don’t optimize for attention.

The foundation must be true first, and if it is, people will show up. They’ll shout ‘GO GRAEME’ at a dog they’ve never met. They’ll text their people and make it theirs.

The dog show organizers understand something brand marketers should too. Every hollow moment, every manufactured feeling erodes trust and people’s appetite to seek out brands that are genuine. We can’t afford to keep spending that trust down because when everyone is faking it, the moment a consumer catches you doing the same is the exact moment they lose interest and walk away.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This year, 600,000 people watched Westminster on TV and 50,000 attended in person. Millions more joined in through group chats, their TikTok For You pages. The key to success? A group of people who really like dogs started the group that remains committed to its initial mission. And 150 years later, it’s still pulling people in because they feel like part of the experience.

People haven’t changed. They still want to show up. They still want to belong to something. The only question any marketer or creative person should be asking, the only one that has ever really mattered, is whether you give them something worth showing up for.

Helen Andrews is the CEO of Johannes Leonardo.

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