Mars wants to future proof impulse buys as AI is poised to take over more grocery runs

Digiday caught up with Reynolds to discuss how Mars is trying to sell products to AI, the upshot of AI visibility and the future of impulse purchases in an agentic landscape.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Mars has new research: agentic technology handles grocery shopping and physical stores and digital platforms become a place for discovery and entertainment. What does that mean for Mars commerce plans?

For us, the road map sits against those two parallel parts… how can we build the right capabilities internally to make sure our categories and our brand really shine in agentic commerce. That means, how do we make sure our brands are discoverable by the LLMs and how do we make sure that once those brands are discovered, that they convert through to purchase? The second milestone plan, or the second road map, is around, how do we start to step into building these experiential, immersive retail destinations for our stores? How do we partner with our retailers to think about, in effect, creating different cultural environments, and building a different experience when you step into a store?

What is Mars doing now to prepare for the shift?

The first thing we’re trying to do is sort of get some real data around what’s the start point for how our categories and how our brands show up. What that looks like for us is trying to get data through partnerships with emerging tech companies to get a start point for how we can show up in the LLM. What’s the data that, in effect, is showing up and where’s that data being sourced from? 

Part of this genuinely is about connectivity between the teams. We’re setting up what we call One Demand performance squads — which are, again, how do you get the brand manager next to the insights person next to the key account manager next to the category manager, and the agency partner?  

Last summer, Mars hired Publicis to lead its connected commerce capabilities. What can Mars do now that it couldn’t with previous agency relationships?

Winning this consumer journey through effortless, personalized and experiential, will be within the Publicis functionality or contract as well now. Our historical relationships are more been around media and creative, and what we’ve now got with Publicis is an end-to-end agency partner who can also support us with commerce. We can unlock some of the data that they have. They talk about connected ID being part of their offer, and then we can ideate to build those effortless, personalized experiential shopper experiences.

If shopping agents take on more of the grocery runs, how is Mars thinking about its relationship with retailers?

Back in the day, we would have a salesperson from Mars going to see a commercial buyer from a retailer. But we’ve quite quickly worked out that if we want to be strategic partners, we need to bring more people to that conversation. For example, how can we have a tech-to-tech conversation. Why is our data team not talking to the data team at Walmart? 

We have ongoing conversations with many of the key leading retailers around, call it “store of the future initiatives” — and how we can ideate around continuing to create even more immersive and engaging shopping experiences for snacking in their stores.