Marketing can’t stand apart from sales, which is why Mars Food is integrating its sales and marketing operations as a demand gen focused unit.
Mars Food lobal chief marketing and customer experience officer Clarence Mak told Marketing Week that the change is slow, but it is essential to drive category growth.
A customer market insight team is working with Mars’ research agencies and data teams to create solutions to accurately measure marketing’s impact on sales. The brand teams can then deploy these tools to understand consumer purchase decisions and determine where to spend future budget.
“There is no point doing marketing if consumers are not buying in the store so we need to make sure people [in the business] understand that is the angle,” Mak told Marketing Week. “It is not always easy because every functional team has its own functional agenda, but internally we are setting the tone from the top.”
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One way Mars Food is driving growth is by bringing purpose to its products. The Uncle Ben’s brand, for example, has an initiative to encourage children to learn how to cook.
“All of us want to impact the world and for building brands, building meaning is important,” Mak said, noting the metrics behind this type of strategy are tricky to gauge. “Some brands naturally have a place to land in purpose then there are some brands that you wouldn’t think have a purpose, like Skittles. But the brand has a rainbow banner and so for Pride we turned it white. You can say that’s opportunistic but that is also where we feel we can make an impact.”
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