Every large organization considers big strategy shifts to be carried out by change programs over 3-5 years. In 2019, we supported the Media team at Mars corporate level to refine and begin communicating the strategy to 150 associates across petcare, food and snacking.
This strategy was to deliver across 3 core pillars by 2025. To bring along not only core media experts, but their counterparts in their media agency. To deliver the change however, we needed to influence markets across regions as well as influence other teams within the wider Mars Marketing community.
Starting with the end in mind, we worked with the leadership team and their media agency partner to define the 3 core pillars of their Media 2025 transformational change, utilizing the expertise in the room to build a future that was highly desireable for the business. This was launched through a virtual summit (due to Covid restrictions) to 100 participants, spanning core Media and the agency partners.
Following the successful launch, we jumped onto improving the digital experience of the associates via Grapevine. This through intelligent campaigning, storytelling and annual summits meant we were increasing our audience every year. Before long, we had built a media community of over 1200 members across other functions and teams that were all interested in the change program and being influenced by the strategy.
To maintain momentum and act as a steady drumbeat, we would repeat the same tactics each year around virtual events, storytelling, campaigning and audience mapping to make sure we communicated relevant topics.
Along the way, we also supported the enterprise media leadership team with:
- Culture and ways of working workshops in person
- Storytelling exercises
- Support building the team
- Communicating across Mars and their agency partners
- Supporting the evidence for stakeholder led program
- Insight gathering to measure success across suppliers and campaigns
Defined as ‘best-in-class’ by the global director of Mars Inc, this change program delivered success on several fronts and was deemed as complete by the beginning of 2025, allowing the Media team to refocus to the next horizon of strategy to be implemented.
We grew the average audience size of the virtual summits from roughly 100 attendees to 580 with a true split across all areas of Mars and their support in the creative and media agencies. This was done through intelligent communications which utilized some of Mars’ own media principles from the change strategy, but by also remaining human centred in our approach and making sure to understand who the change affects and how to reach out to them.
Through storytelling, we were able to capture cross-segment pollination whereby work carried out by one brand in Mars Food, directly influenced the approach in another brand in Mars Petcare which led to a similar key result of 3.5% sales uplift.
The change program has been defined as a success 12 months ahead of schedule.
Growth of the community: 100-1200 In 2 years
Change campaigns delivered: 20
Events hosted: 8
Evidence of strategy delivered: 32 instances
Summit relevance: >99% of attendees found high-value events valuable