I just read the 2015 Banfield State of Pet Health Report http://bit.ly/1UE1SZX and I cannot recommend it strongly enough to anybody who works in the veterinary profession.  The report “..focuses on the differences between how veterinarians and pet owners perceive preventive care and what that means for pet health.”  

Veterinary visits are declining, and vets are seeing less pets. A lot of the blame in recent years went to the economy, but the decline in veterinary visits started before The Great Recession of 2008. 

A commonly cited paradigm for how we should think about marketing is “The 4 P’s”:  product, price, promotion, and place.  For our use, place is synonymous with distribution:  how do your clients receive products and services from you?  The obvious answer is “at the clinic”, and that might have been the end of the discussion when I graduated from vet school in 1995.  In 2015, however, the complete answer is far more complex than that.  Where else are you providing service to your clients?  The Internet has completely revolutionized the idea of “place” with respect to the traditional definition of marketing mix.  Truth be told, this is the one “P” that has changed the most in the digital revolution.