Mars Pet Care

Mars Petcare sees 11% lift in category sales with Trax

In overcoming the challenges associated with a changing retail landscape, Mars Petcare, a leading CPG company, leveraged Trax’s powerful insights and data-driven solutions to measure compliance, improve product visibility and on-shelf availability (OSA), and power its retail operations across stores.

3x

increase in captaincies

$6.8M to $7.1M

category growth

11% lift

in pet category sales

The challenge

With the expansion of SKUs within the pet world over the past few years and brands shifting across different channels, shoppers became overwhelmed and began to navigate aisles based on color, deselecting other items on the shelf. This limits manufacturers’ ability to raise awareness for their products on the shelf, making it infeasible to drive more dollars for pounds.

At the same time, consumption in areas like the dry dog category is over 90%, the pet population is flat and stagnant, and the dog sizes are declining with people preferring smaller sized pets. This means there is no opportunity to attract new shoppers, and there is a need to convert existing shoppers to buy more premium offerings. And the place to do this is at the shelf, since as much as 96% of purchases are made in the aisle, making shelf execution extremely vital and critical for success.

Mars had a Perfect Store program centered around a circular multi-stage process that put the shopper’s needs at its core. However, the brand couldn’t truly see what the shoppers were seeing on shelves, thus hampering execution. Collaborating with Trax gave Mars eyes in the store and real-time, actionable data.

The approach

Mars has a set of well-established core KPIs. Using Trax technology, the brand was able to calculate KPI compliance. The data from shelf images was analyzed using Trax technology to determine what was compliant and what wasn’t.

Mars was able to understand gaps in compliance and get a visual representation through the Trax dashboards that made it easy for the company to view and action the results. In addition, Trax also provided the brand access to Nielsen sales data, so Mars could analyze the results from Trax within the sales context to understand the true impact of each compliance measure.

The results

Thanks to Trax’ insights, Mars achieved an 11% pet category sales lift and +118 lift in the dry dog velocity index. Mars also witnessed a three-fold increase in captaincies from the first year to the third year which helped to grow category sales across top customers during that period from $6.8 to $7.1.

Mars’s subsidiaries also witnessed a significant increase; retailers’ Mars shares increased across the three-year period from 20.3% in Y1 to 27.4% in Y3.

The bottom line

Trax helped Mars to overcome many challenges associated with the changing retail landscape. The impact has not only led to the growth of Mars, but the category as well, and has led to increased partnerships with retailers.

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