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"We're really here to drive transformational analytics solutions." — Celia Van Wickel, Director of Omnichannel Digital Commerce Analytics, Mars
For a brand to survive more than 100 years, it has to continually innovate and adapt. Throughout its history, Mars, the global petcare, nutrition, and snack food company, has done this by standing up and scaling new capabilities that empower its regional teams while supporting a global and cohesive commerce strategy.
Today, Mars is innovating by building an advanced data and analytics capability to drive efficiency, growth, and profitability.
Celia Van Wickel, director of omnichannel digital commerce analytics at Mars, joined a recent episode of the "Unpacking the Digital Shelf" podcast, "A Model for Global Analytics Transformation and Harmonization," to share how Mars has built its digital commerce analytics operation, how it fosters effective collaboration across its global and regional teams, and how harnessing the power of data and analytics helps the company better engage consumers online and off.
Van Wickel’s global team, created in 2022, focuses on digital commerce, omnichannel, and advanced analytics activation to drive the demand side of Mars’ business. Her team builds best-in-class analytics solutions and business intelligence tools to support the company’s strategic goals, putting data into the hands of various sales leaders to drive growth on channels ranging from Amazon and Sam’s Club to Instacart, Uber Eats, and other on-demand delivery platforms.
One focus area for Van Wickel’s team is developing solutions for more effective digital shelf measurement, or what the company calls "perfect digital store capabilities."
Building these capabilities has required deep collaboration between Mars' global and regional teams. The focus has been on creating a unified strategy that serves the company’s biggest markets in the U.S., Europe, and Asia but also scales across the more than 180 countries where Mars has a presence.
"It starts with global strategy first. What are we trying to achieve? How did the markets and regions enable that? And then we work with those regional partners to help us activate and buy into the solutions so they can actually build the next best in class measurement for their areas, as well." — Celia Van Wickel, Director of Omnichannel Digital Commerce Analytics, Mars
Creating scalable data and analytics solutions is difficult for most brands, but in a company as big as Mars, it requires lots of thoughtful planning.
Van Wickel says every region has different levels of data quality, varied data sources, and measurement approaches, so her team often works with each market to either use the data they already have to activate Mars’ global analytics solutions or develop a data plan to help them take advantage of the solutions. These efforts ensure every region is looking at performance in the same way.
Some of the key performance metrics (KPIs) and areas Mars tracks across regions include search content drivers, share of search, content health scores, and the incrementality of onsite paid media measurement, among other metrics. Some of the analytics solutions Van Wickel’s team has created include forecasting tools to help local markets better understand the value of investing in a particular channel and search algorithm decoding tools to examine different retailers’ algorithms and understand the value drivers for each retailer.
"We can actually see the drivers from uncoding that search algorithm, and we'll know whether it's our content presence or it's our sales drivers or it's other types of taxonomy that we need to drive within that retailer ecosystem," Van Wickel says.
Van Wickel’s team also works with Mars’ sales team to better understand ecommerce profit and loss (P&L) statements for every customer in each region, bringing together different ecommerce point-of-sale (POS) data to gain more insight into what drives profitability and better performance across channels.
To support Mars’ analytics transformation, Van Wickel says it’s been critical to understand business needs first before developing any analytics tool.
"If I'm building ‘perfect store’ or sales movement, what matters to that person?" she says. "What are they trying to drive? How do we leverage interviewing and design thinking skills to understand those business needs first before we go build anything? So, that's really one of the things we do."
Along with this approach, having product owners who can take ownership of the analytics solutions in their region is key. These leaders drive change management training and enablement in their local market.
"We still need those regional, market-level partners around the world to help us embed that connectivity of the data for their markets," Van Wickel says. "We need someone who has strong sponsorship and ownership of wanting these capabilities within their market."
These local data product owners are the true transformation enablers, helping Van Wickel’s team develop and deploy powerful data analytics solutions that drive Mars’ global strategy.
Over the last two years, Van Wickel’s team has learned several lessons that could be valuable to other brands that want to accelerate their analytics transformation:
It’s crucial to engage stakeholders who will use the tools and educate them about what analytics can do for their team. Van Wickel’s team often discusses how the tool can save the organization time and drive more value in terms of net dollars back into the business.
"When they can understand those drivers, they then get more bought in for their team. I actually think time savings has more value sometimes than the actual value of dollars in the business," she says.
Van Wickel’s team also leans on these product owners to train their teams and advance their data literacy. Her global team often creates thought starters and comprehensive change management plans to enable the training process for regional teams.
"They actually become the central point of knowing everything that's in that tool and knowing what it is measuring," Van Wickel says of the local product owners.
It takes time to create a truly data-driven organization and to embed analytics into core business processes. Van Wickel says cross-functional teams must realize this will require a significant time investment upfront, but they’ll get a return on investment once these tools are adopted across the enterprise.
She also says it’s important to take incremental steps. Employees may not need the "fancy AI model" right away, Van Wickel says, so it’s better to focus on building a solid data foundation and integrating internal and external data sources first. From there, brands can mature their organization’s analytics capabilities.
Track and Measure
Once tools are in-market, it’s not enough to assume they’ll work well for every use case or will continue to be valuable. Business needs often change, so Van Wickel’s team has implemented adoption surveys to understand how the company’s analytics tools are perceived and how they can make them better.
Data isn’t static, so Mars will need to continually assess what it has and how to best activate data to achieve its strategic goals. Van Wickel says Mars’ leadership team realizes the value data can deliver and is fully onboard with advancing the company's analytics maturity.
"We're really here to drive transformational analytics solutions," Van Wickel says. "They want us to globally scale capabilities to unify measurement and to have a holistic view of what's going on around the world, so they are supporting this. This is core and fundamental to the organization."
To hear more of Van Wickel’s perspective on driving analytics transformation, listen to the full episode.
