For businesses to drive true sustained growth, all functions must be working towards shared goals. While marketing and sales will both be striving to drive revenue and profit for their organisation, often the two teams can find themselves misaligned and speaking in different languages.

Not so at Mars Food and Nutrition, where CMO Matthew Graham has been leading a united team of marketing and sales to drive growth for the business. The company, which owns brands including Ben’s Original and Dolmio, has aligned its sales and marketing function to drive “magic”, Graham claims.

He has experience in both functions having worked at Mars for almost 25 years, some of which time was spent in sales. This has given him an understanding of both the needs of retail customers and consumers.

“I’ve spent a lot of my years in sales, more of my years in marketing. I can understand the customer agenda, I can understand the consumer agenda, and the magic is when they meet,” he explains.

The example he gives is work the business did to create a new category with its retail partners via the launch of Ben’s Original Lunch Bowl – lunch meals for one consumers can simply microwave.

However, when Mars first launched the product, ambient ready meals wasn’t really a category that existed in grocery aisles, Graham notes. Mars went to retail partner Tesco with insight demonstrating the category’s potential.

[The Ben’s Original Lunch Bowl launch] wouldn’t have happened if sales and marketing didn’t, at the start, go into that customer conversation with one aligned vision.

Matt Graham, Mars

The insight Mars brought to Tesco was so persuasive the retailer was ready to go all in on the vision for the new category, giving Ben’s the shelf space it needed to launch the new product. Since then the numbers of SKUs (stock keeping units) has grown, with Mars expanding its ready meal concept into the Dolmio brand, launching Pasta Pronto products.

Mars has “led” other brands into the category, Graham says, meaning ambient ready meals have become a substantial fixture in supermarket aisles. The move has brought consumers into the wider category when they might have looked elsewhere.

Overall, it has been a strong success for both Mars and Tesco, states Graham.

“That wouldn’t have happened if sales and marketing didn’t, at the start, go into that customer conversation with one aligned vision called a category vision, clear insight and the customer was brought into it,” he says.

What might have happened in the past is that marketing would have done the presentation, given it to sales who would have gone in “probably six months before the launch”, he says. Instead, marketing and sales started working with the customer together to develop the proposition, years before launch. As a result, Mars and the retailer were able to deliver “mutual growth”.

‘From side to centre of plate’

The work on the Ben’s Original Lunch Bowl launch played into the idea of taking the brands in the company’s portfolio “from side to centre of plate”.

Whereas in the past a brand like Ben’s Original with its rice products may have been seen as a side or accompaniment, Mars is trying to make its products the main event by innovating to create complete meals.

This move broadens the appeal of its brands, making them relevant to more occasions, but it also serves a consumer need, says Graham. He refers to US data suggesting 50% of consumers want to have meals they can prepare in under 15 minutes, while two-thirds don’t know what they’re going to be cooking for dinner at three or four o’clock in the afternoon.

In the industry, we probably spend too much time talking about innovation, because most of our growth and volume will come from our core.

Matt Graham, Mars

Consumers want a product that’s “tasty, accessible and healthy”, and which helps to solve those “pain points” shown in the US data, which Graham says are common across Mars’ developed markets.

“That need is why we’re moving more of our strategy from side to centre of plate to recruit using these complete meals,” he says.

Arguing the move into ambient ready meals is fulfilling those consumer needs, Graham explains it’s not too much of a stretch for consumers to start seeing Mars’ brands as main meal contenders.

“We probably historically have put more constraint on ourselves around how far our brands can stretch, versus what our consumers think,” he notes.

Valuing the core

That move to shift strategy towards “centre of plate” involves innovation. Graham explains his work as a marketer is “intrinsically linked” with R&D, with the teams working side by side.

While innovation is a key part of the strategy, the CMO also believes marketers shouldn’t get overly focused on new products.

“In the industry, we probably spend too much time talking about innovation, because most of our growth and volume will come from our core,” he says.

Why focusing on market share may lead marketers down a ‘dangerous’ path

In an environment where consumers are feeling pressure on their spending, they are looking for products that really deliver. Therefore, driving product performance and quality across Mars’ core is critical for Graham. He considers this an essential tool when it comes to growing categories – a key task for Mars. Around 70% of the business’s growth comes from categories, with just 30% coming from stealing share.

Therefore, category growth is the goal for Mars. How the brands achieve that is built “from the ground up”, says Graham, which means combining everything from product performance to mental and physical availability, and building strong brands.

“Those fundamental execution elements are what’s going to build categories,” he says.