Mars Case Study - Structure Before Spend

(How Mars reframed digital as a marketing enabler — not a silo)

The Challenge:

This wasn’t about selling more bags of pet food. Mars needed clarity. Across brands, markets, and internal teams, “digital” meant different things to different people — and that was slowing everything down. The real brief? Build alignment, confidence, and momentum across the organisation. Less media. More meaning.

The Approach:

We started by listening — leading stakeholder interviews across markets to uncover confusion and misalignment. Then we reframed digital as a means, not an end: a tool to support marketing fundamentals. A practical, jargon-free training module followed, backed by a scorecard and a decision framework to help teams know when to go global, and when to go local.

Key Moves:

• 🗣️ Led multi-market interviews to uncover digital confusion points

• 🔧 Reframed digital as a core enabler of marketing fundamentals

• 📘 Built Digital Without the Jargon — a hands-on module for senior teams

• 🧭 Introduced an internal scorecard tied to clarity, consistency, and confidence

• 🌍 Created a decision framework for local vs. global digital investments

Results That Mattered:

• 📈 +40% uplift in internal digital maturity scores (pulse survey)

• 🎯 5 markets reprioritised digital projects with new strategic clarity

• 🧱 “Structure Before Spend” adopted as a global leadership mantra

• 🚀 Work cited as the blueprint for future capability rollouts