For Mars, the disruption caused by digital to the shopper journey presents a huge challenge. More consumers are buying online and competitors are emerging built around digital business models – areas of weakness for Mars. Mars needed a structured way of testing new ideas by harnessing the power of emerging start-ups and technologies, address the challenges bought by digitization and quickly scaling successes across brands and geographies.
In 2017, BLINK Consulting designed and built the Launchpad programme. We created a process that identified the most pressing business challenges across the organisation globally by listening to the needs of the markets. The most strategically aligned challenges were turned into briefs, and our team of technology experts sourced potential partners from the start-up world who could bring new solutions to Mars. Running agile pilots, we tested these solutions, and democratised the learnings throughout the wider Mars business to raise digital understanding. We also built a scaling process to ensure that new capabilities could be quickly rolled out to multiple markets and drive growth for Mars.
The programme has evolved over the last five years and to date Launchpad has:
Launchpad has enabled global transformational change at Mars, modernising their approach to digital / data and ways of working.
