A treat brand inside a pet-food group.

Temptations is a cat treat brand owned by Mars, Incorporated and sold through its pet business, Mars Petcare. The brand’s own website carries the copyright line of Mars, Incorporated and invites visitors to hear from Temptations “and other Mars Petcare brands,” which places it in the same family as Whiskas, the Mars cat food, and Greenies, the Mars dental treats.

The name is not the same everywhere. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, describing the brand in a 2024 case study, says that Temptations is labelled Dreamies in the United Kingdom and other markets. The product is one brand inside Mars, but shoppers in different countries meet it under two different names, so its identity has to work through colour, character and tone as much as through a single word on the pack.

The brand’s trademark notice on its website names two elements. Alongside the word mark, Mars lists the “TEMPTATIONS Cat and Cloud design” as a trademark, a pairing of a cat with a cloud. The brand also runs channels on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

One word Mars returns to for the brand is “irresistibility.” It appears in the way Mars Petcare North America’s marketing team described Temptations to Pet Food Processing in 2023, and the IPA’s account of the advertising names “irresistible taste” as the brand’s established core benefit. That single idea links the treats, the later dry food and the campaign that sells them.

From treats to the food bowl.

For most of its life Temptations was a treats-only brand. That changed in March 2023. Pet Food Processing, in a report by Nicole Kerwin dated 9 March 2023 and datelined Franklin, Tennessee, said that Temptations, described as a cat treat brand by Mars Petcare, had launched its first complete-and-balanced dry cat food on 7 March. The new food was sold first at Walmart, with wider availability planned later in the year.

The same report described how the product carried the treat idea into the bowl. The dry food mixed ordinary kibble with crunchy and creamy “pockets” of the kind associated with the brand’s treats, so that the familiar Temptations piece appeared inside a meal product. At the same time the brand launched a new treat, Tender Fills, and a new platform to support the brand.

Jean-Paul Jansen, vice president of marketing at Mars Petcare North America, explained the move in the brand’s own terms. “Our TEMPTATIONS brand has an established history of irresistibility, with a loyal feline fanbase that loves TEMPTATIONS treats,” he said, according to the report, adding that cat owners often told the company how much their cats went “crazy” for them. He framed the dry food as a way to “break down that cool cat exterior.” Kaitlyn Shadiow, vice president of merchandising for pets at Walmart, said in the same report that the dry food gave customers “a new way to experience a brand they already love.”

That phrase connects the launch to the brand’s advertising. The IPA’s case study, entered in the IPA Effectiveness Awards and listed on the IPA’s own website as a Bronze award in 2024, credits the agency adam&eveDDB with work for client Mars Inc. on the Temptations brand. According to the IPA, the advertising stayed true to the brand’s established core benefit of irresistible taste, and its executions, under the line “Cats Lose Their Cool,” were inspired both by an algorithm that analysed how people discussed cats and by a database of “perfect cat” tropes from popular culture.

Design and documentation.

The eight brands in this group are all dog and cat food or treat names. Pet-food brands sit at many different points in the trade, from companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger food or confectionery groups, and a single brand may be sold under more than one name in different countries.

A pet-food brand’s identity is carried mostly by its bag, can or pouch: the name set large, a photograph or drawing of an animal, a few strong colours that make a range easy to sort on a shelf, and sometimes a mascot or a jingle remembered from television. Because the company behind the name may have changed hands several times, the questions behind each name are worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and how its packs and advertising have changed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its origins, its owners over time and its advertising — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A cat, a cloud and a lost composure.

The Temptations identity is built less on the treat than on the cat’s reaction to it. The trademarked Cat and Cloud design puts an animal at the centre of the mark, and the advertising takes the same direction: the subject is not the product on its own but a cat behaving in a way its owner did not expect.

“Cats Lose Their Cool” turns that into a single, repeatable idea. The line takes the image of the aloof, self-possessed cat and reverses it. Because the IPA describes the work as drawing on a catalogue of “perfect cat” tropes and on how people talk about cats online, the advertising can borrow from a familiar set of feline types rather than inventing new characters each time.

The same idea carried the 2023 move into dry food. Instead of presenting the meal as a separate product with its own story, Mars described it in the language of the treats, with pockets inside the kibble and a promise to break down the “cool cat exterior.” The extension kept the brand’s voice intact while widening what the name covers.

The two names add a further layer. Temptations in the United States and Dreamies in the United Kingdom and other markets describe the same Mars treat, so the identity has to travel without relying on its word mark alone. Character, colour and the cat-centred tone do much of that work.

For a design guide, Temptations shows how a treat brand can make the animal’s reaction its central visual idea and keep that idea across names, markets and product types. Compare it with Whiskas, its stablemate in Mars cat food, and Greenies, the Mars treat brand built around dental chews. For this guide we use treat purple and cloud gold on cloud white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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