To replace the existing e-commerce platform

To create an omnichannel consumer experience

- Mars has built a platform for launching e-commerce value propositions, with M&Ms as the lead brand
- The podcast features discussions on innovation, commerce, emotive marketing, and career changes
- Mars has recognized the importance of being an omnichannel ecosystem for success in direct-to-consumer strategies
- Kyle Bass from Mars and Kasper Rasmussen from Valtech discuss the complexities and challenges of Mars's DTC transformation
- Mars has faced challenges in replatforming e-commerce sites, navigating internal knowledge gaps, and developing the ecosystem platform

- The video discusses the challenges and complexities of transforming a brand's digital ecosystem
- The focus is on the transformation of Mars' digital business
- The importance of a composable architecture and omni-channel capability is highlighted
- The need for a mindset shift and the approach to maintaining momentum in the program is discussed
- The importance of time to value and the evolution of architectural components is emphasized
- The reflection on the journey and the focus on DevOps for engineering practices is mentioned

- The speaker discusses the value of demonstrating and receiving feedback on a personalized M&M website before its full launch
- They mention rewriting the front end UX and getting feedback from internal associates before external launch
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of managing risk and launching features iteratively
- They also discuss the business value of the approach and the potential for extending the platform to other brands within Mars
- The conversation concludes with a focus on the transformative nature of direct-to-consumer strategies and the opportunities they bring

Mars has built an e-commerce platform with M&Ms as the lead brand. The podcast discusses innovation, emotive marketing, and career changes. Mars recognizes the importance of being an omnichannel ecosystem for success in direct-to-consumer strategies. Challenges in replatforming e-commerce sites and developing the ecosystem platform are discussed. The importance of composable architecture, omni-channel capability, and maintaining momentum in the program is highlighted. The value of demonstrating and receiving feedback on a personalized M&M website before its full launch is emphasized. Managing risk, launching features iteratively, and the potential for extending the platform to other Mars brands are also discussed. The conversation concludes with a focus on the transformative nature of direct-to-consumer strategies and the opportunities they bring."""

Mars brand M&M'S have been working with Valtech t…

We would have to go build from scratch, if you will, and get approvals for everything and integrate.

Our time to value was quite delayed and frequently the opportunities would go past us.

So what we've done over the last 2 years is really build out a platform that Mars can launch different e-commerce value propositions on.

We've taken M&Ms as the lead brand, as the lead use case, to build what we call a product on top of that platform that we've now launched externally for our consumers.

And we are back for series 3 of Transformation Stories from the award-winning Beltec Cafe.

This series, we're talking innovation, commerce, emotive marketing and career changes.

We'll also dip into trends in fintech, digital health, retail, mobility, manufacturing, and speak to CEOs, CDOs, SMEs, and lots of other acronyms too.

As always, you can expect gloriously unscripted discussions that shed an open and transparent light on the ebb and flow of our digital world.

I'm Tizy Philp and welcome to the podcast.

With so many opportunities stemming from the creation of a closer relationship with the customer, It's no wonder that so many brands are embarking on direct-to-consumer or D2C strategies.

But it's not enough to just deliver a D2C approach and then to step away.

To truly make the direct-to-consumer vision a working reality requires changes at every level of the organization.

From technology decisions to organizational structures and indeed mindsets, the D2C ambition requires a long-term outlook.

Global brand Mars M&Ms have been working with Valtech to define and build their long-term D2C strategy with encouraging results.

So why are they set up for success when so many others are losing their ability to pivot?

Well, much of it is down to their recognition of the vitality of being an ecosystem, becoming omnichannel in the strongest sense of the word, where customers can start anywhere, pause anywhere, and resume at any time of their buying journey, has been the critical differentiator.

In this conversation, I'm joined by Kyle Bass, Director of Global Retail and E-commerce Technology at Mars Wrigley, and Kasper Rasmussen, SVP of Technology here at Valtech and President of the MAC Alliance, to talk about the complexity of Mars's own DTC transformation, as well as the common challenges and pitfalls brands should seek to avoid as they embark on their own journey.

So Kyle and Kasper, welcome to the podcast.

I always like to start with introductions.

Tell us more about you, your experience and indeed your current role at Mars.

So, Kyle Bars, I have been with Mars for almost 23 years now, the vast majority of that all within the e-commerce and retail space.

I started my career as a developer in the early days back in 2000 and then have had a series of progressively expanding roles since then.

Currently, I look after direct-to-consumer and physical retail for the Mars Wrigley segments.

The biggest brand that we have within the Mars Wrigley segment that has direct-to-consumer and retail activity is of course M&M's.

So I look after M&M's.com both here in the US and Europe.

And then we have 7 M&M's flagship stores.

We have 1 in London, 1 in Berlin, and 1 in Shanghai, China.

And then of course, I also look after all of the backend technologies that make all of the magic work behind the scenes.

Very much still a principles-led business.

The 2 biggest ones, of course, are Mars Pet Care with some amazing brands like Pedigree, Sheba, Royal Canin.

There's also a big section for Vet Health where we have VCA and Banfield amongst some other hospitals.

And then of course, the segment that I get to work with the most is Mars Wrigley with brands like Snickers and Twix and of course Wrigley and M&Ms.

And we also have Mars Food, which has some great brands like Benz Originals and Domeo Sauce, et cetera.

I'm the Global SVP of Technology here at Valtech, and I'm also the president of the Mach Alliance.

Well, I'm fairly involved with some of our most strategic clients, and I'm basically a practitioner of Mach, So helping our clients really go through the transformation that Mach is at the core and supporting on both Technology strategy, but absolutely also on architecture So fairly involved in the day-to-day and also super passionate about what Mach really can unlock for these types of businesses.

And a regular voice on these podcasts, of course, as well.

So let's begin the conversation then and open by discussing some of the complexities you were faced with, Kyle, and how you've approached these changes that you knew that you needed to make ultimately.

If I rewind a little bit, I'll rewind about 2 years when we kind of came up on this cadence where we had frequently been replatforming our e-commerce sites every sort of 2 to 3 years.

And we were starting to experience again, some fractures in the foundations of our e-commerce platform.

And we knew that we needed to move forward with the kind of the next steps, right?

The next generation of our e-commerce foundations.

And then parallel to that, we also had a couple other things going on.

You'll certainly remember 2 years ago, the beginning of the pandemic, beginning of COVID, and As Mars, as were some other CPG companies, we were looking for other direct-to-consumer opportunities, direct-to-consumer value propositions that we could launch.

And we were frequently running into challenges where if we were, every time we wanted to launch something or launch something to test, we would have to go kind of build from scratch, if you will, and get approvals for everything and integrate all of those different applications into the back-end systems.

So our time to value was quite delayed and frequently the opportunities would go past us.

The other thing that was really happening was from overall, from an M&M's standpoint, so we had a lot of transformation happening within the M&M's ecosystem or the M&M's brand.

And that historically things were operating in silos.

We had the M&M's brand team operating in 1 way.

We had M&M's.com operating in another direction.

And M&M's from a physical store standpoint certainly had a different direction.

And yet from a consumer's point of view, M&M's was M&M's.

And we were, we took that opportunity to really create the concept of an M&M's ecosystem, where the sum of that ecosystem is greater than its individual components.

And of course, M&M's as a brand was also going through a transformation, right, with the launch of a whole new brand purpose, the launch of a new character.

And of course, you probably have seen in the news the refreshed characters that have launched.

And it was really with all of these 3 factors that we knew we needed to do something different at Mars about e-commerce.

And of course, we went out and evaluated the different solutions that existed at the time And kind of came to the realization that in order to really create the ecosystem that we wanted from an e-commerce standpoint, we would need to build something that was a bit more flexible so we could get out of this cadence, every platforming the site every 2 to 3 years.

In looking at sort of mock versus the different monolithic solutions out there, we certainly came to the realization that while it wasn't going to be easy, it would be the more difficult route certainly was going to be the best route for Mars at the end of the day.

And so what we've done over the last 2 years is really build out a platform that Mars can launch different e-commerce value propositions on.

And So then we've taken M&Ms as the lead brand, as the lead use case, to build what we call a product on top of that platform that we've now launched externally for our consumers.

And really over that time, since you asked about some of the questions of what were some of the complexities that we faced in that journey.

Certainly when we started this journey 2 years ago, there wasn't the concept per se of the Mach Alliance.

We had a lot of investigation of a lot of our own research and development that we really had to do internally in order to develop what our platform would look like.

We had to go evaluate all of the different components that make this M&Ms or make this Mars direct-to-consumer platform actually work at the end of the day.

And quite frankly, we didn't get it all right in the first time around, right?

We would get a little bit down a certain path and sometimes we had to rewind and start over.

And then we also had some challenges, certainly around internal gaps in knowledge as well, right?

If there wasn't much knowledge externally, certainly there was not much knowledge internally.

So we had a lot of learning to do ourselves just in how we would bring this ecosystem to life from a platform standpoint.

Thank you for setting that up so brilliantly to get us more into detail in this conversation then around lots of different aspects here.

So I'm going to come to you first, Kasper, on that.

As well as your role here at Valtech, we mentioned that you're also the president of the Mac Alliance.

I enjoyed in the introduction, there was a slight pause after you said president and then came to Mac Alliance.

So we left us hanging there on president, president.

But this must be a very common situation that a lot of brands find themselves in not knowing how to approach that or even if it makes sense for them?

And I think you said it quite well, Kyle.

And no 1 has ever stated that it should be easy.

But this is definitely an investment in the future when brands and companies like yourself go down this type of a transformation to exactly avoid those replatforms that are hindering progress in the future.

And some of the typical situations that we see brands and businesses within is exactly this notion that Mach is more than tech, right?

It involves teams, it involves skills, it involves evaluations, it involves planning and time to value.

Some of the statements that you mentioned along the way there too.

And it also means that there is a really good spot for both companies like Valtech, really being that trusted advisor and that trusted partner to companies like yourself and kind of being the helping hand as you progress through the journey to help you kind of avoid some of the pitfalls that do exist in these types of transformations, but also for the Mach Alliance.

Because specifically, you mentioned the evaluations part, right?

And going in as a brand and needing to compose your own solution, it also means you need to figure out what the right choices are for the type of tech that you want to partner up with.

And that's where the Mach Alliance does a bit of the grant work and some of the hard work for you now, which is something that clearly is important for the Mach Alliance itself as an organization, its authority, its credibility.

But it's also of a ton of value for actual brands like yourself.

So I'm really happy to hear, proud to hear, to be honest, that this type of evaluation also makes that journey much simpler for companies like yourself.

So Karl, let's put it into practice then and talk more specifically around the situation at Mars.

Can you take us through those initial steps that you then took at the inception of this project?

So, again, kind of going back a year and a half, 2 years ago, of course, it was first evaluated on replacing a platform just for the dot com side, right?

And with its merits just being based upon just replacing or putting in a platform just for .com side.

The complexity, quite frankly, probably wouldn't have been worth it.

We really had to think about what that overall consumer journey looks like across, of course, our dot com, across how the consumer experiences the brand in the stores, and of course, across how the consumer experiences the brand in our own physical M&M stores.

And when we start to thinking about this, more of an omni-channel capability that would develop or bring to life experiences beyond dot com, particularly into our own stores as well.

That's where we really realized that we needed more of the composable architecture, something that we could take and bring the experiences, bring the brand to life online, and certainly bring the brand to life in our own stores through the different consumer touch points that we have.

And so that was really the first step is helping stakeholders understand that, again, not only is this a dot com project, but this is something where we're going to amplify the consumer experience across a variety of different touch points to bring this ecosystem to life, to create that quote unquote connected ecosystem.

I think the other thing was really getting consumers or getting our stakeholders on board really to Casper's point right talking about yes, it's going to be complex.

But yes, it is the right journey for us to go on as an organization.

And when those tough choices came about, that we really, we still needed to keep the eye on the ultimate prize, if you will, at the end of the day of what we're trying to create.

Because again, to the conversation, it certainly, certainly wasn't easy.

There were certainly difficult choices and certainly some mistakes were made along the way.

And we really needed to have the stakeholders' sponsorship in order to keep the journey, keep the vision alive as we went along the journey.

Casper, this level of complexity, as we've said before, is commonplace within many of the brands that we already work with.

And Kyle has just mentioned the mindset shift there that's required to actually make that change happen, make that a reality.

What's your view on the best way to approach that whilst also maintaining the momentum of the program?

You don't want there to be that analysis paralysis just before you start something here.

1 of the things that we collectively between Valtech and Mars found common ground on was this notion of time to value.

Right, really centering ourselves around unlocking value fast for the business because ultimately that's a flywheel effect.

It's kind of propelling us forward as a program itself.

So for instance, 1 of the very tangible ways we did that was we actually recognized the fact that these types of architectures are evolving.

You can start the architecture from any place and then you can build it up and let it grow along the way.

And we let that happen because we wanted to find value in steps.

So we found those business opportunities that really mattered to M&Ms and then we set up an architecture accordingly.

We didn't do that without losing any sight to the actual 2B architecture.

We had that top of mind constantly, but we found our way to progressively introduce architectural components along the way as we saw opportunity in the market.

So really simplifying the place to start, finding our path and letting the architecture evolve with us was super, super important because it also allowed both technology and business to be hand in hand and really orient themselves around this notion of time to value.

Then specifically, there are also some practices.

We talked about the people component or the people element to this.

Just acknowledging that there are no perfect organizations out there.

There is always a skill, there is always a practices gap present.

You need to go into it with eyes wide open to exactly that.

You need to understand where are some of those potential limitations, where are some of those potential pitfalls that you can come into if you're not aware.

1 of the realizations that I know Kyle and I had along the way is really, of course, when you're talking about, Marc, you're also talking about cloud computing.

When you're talking about cloud computing, you're talking about infrastructure.

That means DevOps as a practice is insanely important as you're going into these types of transformations.

And just recognizing that that also means your engineers and your developers need to carry their cloud and their infrastructure acumen into the work is super important too.

So really be open-eyed about some of those potential practices that are prerequisites and kind of that underpins the type of architecture that you're working with here.

And if there are any gaps, then it should not hold you back.

Work with it as a fact so you know exactly what you need to steer with in mind.

So specifically, this notion of time to value, orient and organize your teams around that, and then eyes wide open because nobody's perfect in this world.

There are always things that you need to acknowledge could be improved and that you need to work with in mind.

I would say those are some of the typical complexities.

Kyle, now that you've launched, what are your reflections and takeaways from the last few months of work?

Could you have imagined what's happened and how things happened?

So I think I love what Casper was just talking about in terms of DevOps, has certainly brought a tremendous element of maturity to our engineering practices internally.

And it's something that we will continue to build muscle around, continue to build momentum around as we now get into our sort of regular cadence of launching things into production every 2 weeks at this point with expectations that we get even faster in our ability to release features, release capabilities into our production ecosystem.

If I think a little bit about the journey, certainly some of the steps that we've taken in that journey that we have been through in the last year, year and a half or so as we've moved from our legacy application into the state that we're in today, we went through a couple of key phases in order to get to this point that we're at.

1 was taking some of the new technology that exists out there for sort of compute at edge, better content distribution capabilities to take a big problem that we had, which was around just, quite frankly, very basics of load and performance of our website.

And we were able to take some of these more modern mock tools, more modern mock providers out there and put that in front of our legacy stack and actually help have it accelerate what our previous monolithic experience was.

So it started to show and demonstrate value even very early in the process before we even had it fully completed.

Similarly, there is a very key component of our website of the overall consumer experience and that you can personalize M&Ms, of course.

So you can upload images and provide text and clip art that you ultimately want printed on the M&Ms.

And that piece of the experience, of course, is incredibly critical to the overall consumer journey.

And What we managed to do was rewrite that experience, at least the front end UX part of it, and plug that into our old monolithic stack and start to get feedback from the consumer early before we moved that into the final version of what we just recently launched.

That early feedback really helped us to start making some early changes and iterations on that consumer journey through their M&Ms design process.

And then ultimately helping us to even launch a better experience at the end of the day.

And again, we were able to show business value with improvements in conversion rates and improvements in average order size with the launch of the new configurator.

So again, yes, great technology capabilities, great, good, solid architecture decisions, but ultimately looking at what the business value is that we are demonstrating throughout that journey.

And then before we went and fully launched externally to the consumer, sort of back in the December timeframe into January, we were able to use some of the scale of Mars across the US and Europe and really tap into our internal associate base.

And we did an internal beta launch of the new experience and allowed our most vocal yet most forgiving consumers to provide feedback to us on their experience end to end and give us confidence that when we launch externally to the consumer that everything was going to work at the end of the day.

So that was definitely another big milestone.

While it wasn't quite fully launched externally to the consumer, having some good strong feedback from our internal customers was great.

And then finally, really just over the last 2 months or so, we split apart US and Europe, if you will, and instead of going big bang, launch everything to the consumers all at once, we took very much a methodical and phased, go live approach to help manage risk.

And we launched externally to our consumers in Europe.

And once that got stable and we were confident with how that's performing, we were able to do similarly for the US and launched here.

And it's, Tissie, if I may, because it's super amazing to hear, right?

And sometimes you kind of forget, because you don't see the forest with just trees.

But you can just almost imagine that architecture, how it started out, super simple, with a bit of compute at edge to kind of enable some of the progressive rollout of experiences over time, tackle 1 of the most revenue generating experiences out there, the configurator, this notion of design your own.

And then basically, the architecture got extended and evolved from there.

That is amazing that you can do that these days, right?

Like imagine the alternative which would have been okay super heavy-handed very monolithic approach.

You need to go through a very very high risk process of basically remembering all of the caveats of that business before anything makes it to market and you hope for the best.

I love this because it's really showing this notion of an evolving architecture in action.

So I'm super grateful for having been part of

And certainly, I would say if I had 1 opportunity to rewind and do different steps again, it probably would have been what further could we have even done to go live more iteratively with different features and functionality before we got to the point of the big external launch in the last couple of months.

Again, really just to give us more confidence.

And even honestly, while we're able to show great consumer value externally and the business results certainly came through as well.

It also gives us the knowledge on how to actually manage these platforms.

That's probably the biggest part of the learning is how does it all work and being able to log into the different applications and understand how it's performing and how we need to monitor it.

And the more you can do that iteratively, certainly the better you're able to manage

But the other really interesting things that you mentioned there, Kyle, is that often people forget that this is a business discussion and it becomes something that is very much grounded in a technology discussion.

And I'm wondering from your perspective, Kasper, how much easier is it now when you're talking to brands or people who are considering this approach to talk about it in the sense of business value rather than just a tech discussion?

Because I think sometimes people are intimidated by the technical requirement that comes from something like this.

But if you position it in business terms, it becomes a much more understandable concept.

Because there is a industry-wide recognition that there is value to this type of an approach.

So the proof is in the pudding and it has been proven by brands and the types of stories that we're telling today is going to make it even easier in the future too.

Like some of the value statements that Kyle brought to the table along the way, for instance, this notion of, oh, our experiences is more than the website.

We need to think about technology and user journeys in the same way.

Like these types of conversations or these types of statements are certainly helping too.

So we are starting to really find truly value creating ways to describe Mach.

So we don't need to start by basically explaining the acronym in a very technical way, but we can lead the conversation with some of the opportunity that it brings to businesses now when the competition is fierce or more fierce than it's ever been, to be honest.

1, of course, we have we've launched externally the consumer.

So massive, massive milestone and starting to see the business results come through in that launch.

Now we want to take the capabilities that we've built with M&Ms and start extending that into our own physical stores.

So we have a project that we're actively working on to take the personalization experience that you can experience when you go into the M&M store and move that over to the mock stack that we have built.

So repurposing, reusing a lot of the components that we built to power M&Ms.com, we're able to pull and port and drive the experience in our own physical stores as well, and really connecting that brand experience into the physical world.

And then we wanna take components like that and continue to expand there, right?

So we have opportunities in how we manage content in our stores.

We have a lot of digital displays, of course, and with increasing number of interactive displays that we put into our stores that we want to drive through the same technology stack to bring efficiencies, to bring consistency in that experience.

The other thing that we want to really start tapping into, and there's several conversations actively underway, is bringing that platform to life within Mars.

So we, of course, have built that platform that we've now launched M&Ms.com on top of.

And we want to start extending that to other brands within Mars to drive their time to value, or what I like to also call the time to differentiation and shorten that, right?

So now the core of what they need to launch a direct-to-consumer proposition has largely already been completed.

And they can really, a new brand that wants to launch on the platform can really then focus the majority of their investment and the majority of their time on what makes them unique instead of just focusing on all the foundations.

So we want to launch that and we're kind of doing a little bit of a roadshow internally to showcase and demonstrate the value with those other brands coming onto the platform.

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Transformation Stories: How Mars is Driving Growth with Ecommerce - Valtech Café (1)