Mars’ CMO Gülen Bengi says the FMCG giant has “completely rewritten its rules playbook” on the back of an “amazing” transformational year for the business.
Speaking at Cannes Lions yesterday (16 June), Bengi said that while the business is keeping hold of its “brilliant fundamentals” and maintaining the consistency, meaningful differentiation and values its brands are known for, Mars is changing the way it engages with its audience.
“We’re moving our way of engaging with our fans, communities, our consumers, pet parents,” she told the audience. “We are moving from messaging to two-way engagement. We are inviting our fans and communities into our brand works to co-create experiences with us that have no dead ends and when I say no dead ends, I mean that every engagement leads to another or to the buy button.”
Mars’ CMO Gülen Bengi says the FMCG giant has “completely rewritten its rules playbook” on the back of an “amazing” transformational year for the business.
Speaking at Cannes Lions yesterday (16 June), Bengi said that while the business is keeping hold of its “brilliant fundamentals” and maintaining the consistency, meaningful differentiation and values its brands are known for, Mars is changing the way it engages with its audience.
“We’re moving our way of engaging with our fans, communities, our consumers, pet parents,” she told the audience. “We are moving from messaging to two-way engagement. We are inviting our fans and communities into our brand works to co-create experiences with us that have no dead ends and when I say no dead ends, I mean that every engagement leads to another or to the buy button.”
‘We’ll never think we know everything’: Mars on building its effectiveness culture
Bengi accepts it is not always “easy” to hand over so much control to consumers, even if they do have a “heart-to-heart” connection with the brand, but to achieve authentic personalisation at scale it was ultimately a “no brainer” for the business.
“We know that we must do it because in order to remain iconic you must always be in motion,” she added.
“It is putting the consumer at the centre of everything we do in an engagement manner and it’s a new way of working. We are changing the way we build our brand teams and we have completely rewired our agency ecosystem, and connected it across the internet.”
Experiment to win
Fellow CMOs in the Spotlight panellist, Amazon vice-president of global brand and marketing Claudine Cheever, told the audience about the importance of letting her team make mistakes and experiment to find the best answer.
“We love to say that if you know it’s going to succeed, it’s not an experiment,” she said. “It’s about making sure we give teams a safe space to make mistakes, and we talk about two-way doors and one-way doors. And if the situation is a two-way door and we don’t get it completely right, that’s fine.”
She gave an example of how Amazon freshened up its brand identity for the first time in 23 years last month, explaining how the brand went from 28 colours to just two and had to retire hundreds of logos that would no longer fit the brand guidelines.
We are inviting our fans and communities into our brand works to co-create experiences with us that have no dead ends.
Gülen Bengi, Mars
It was a big decision, because updating so many assets had the potential to break or render unusable certain parts of the site, and to test each one individually would take too long. However, the brand refresh was seen as a two-way door, as the team could always pull back if something went wrong.
Cheever is also trying to make herself less involved in day-to-day decisions, believing greater creativity comes from “pushing down” decisions, allowing her teams to work “faster” and getting out of the way to let her teams do their work.
“If there’s an escalation, sure, I’ll get involved, but I love nothing more than when the team says: ‘You know, we got this.’ That’s one less meeting on the calendar. That really is something that we are trying to do more and more is to push down decision making,” she explained.
The future of work
Cheever and Bengi were joined on the panel by CMO of US healthcare brand Novartis, Gail Horwood, who explained she is most proud of her team when they focus on creativity in a category the firm is not renowned for.
Eighteen months ago the business made a “commitment” to focus on creativity, despite the regulatory concerns that limit what a healthcare brand can do. Novartis has followed through on these ambitions with a Cannes Lions-winning campaign focused on breast cancer awareness.
“It was really focused on what can we do, not what can’t we do, and how to unlock creativity, not just in our ideas, but in our executions,” she said.
The process has been supercharged by utilising generative AI across the marketing function. Horwood dubbed the technology “the future of work”, adding her team are being trained to make the most of the opportunity AI brings.
“We have the ambition to bring AI to all of our processes that don’t have value,” she said. “To unlock creativity and time for storytelling, for synthesis, for collaboration. It’s not about building AI into everything, but using it when appropriate, AI agents when appropriate, and then creativity when appropriate.”
