Amazon and Mars tie-up delivers sales bump

An innovative marketing play by confectionery giant Mars and Amazon drove ‘significant’ results across sales and brand metrics.

Mars partnered with Amazon to engage consumers with the chocolate bar

An innovative partnership between Mars and Amazon to drive brand engagement resulted in a brand awareness boost to 92 per cent and a sales increase of 4.3 per cent.

The “For you who did that thing you did” campaign aimed to re-engage consumers by encouraging people to celebrate the little wins in life. To realise the idea, Mars partnered with Amazon to offer consumers the chance to win a free Mars bar with their next Amazon order. The campaign harnessed Amazon’s generative AI to select the winning submissions from the 60,000 entries submitted over the eight-week period from August to October last year

The marketing activity delivered a 4.3 per cent increase in post-campaign sales, and a bump in brand awareness to reach 92 per cent awareness, which Mars head of brand and content Richard Weisinger called “significant”.

“A two-percentage-points increase might not sound a lot but if you are a household staple brand like Mars bar, that 90 per cent of Australians are pretty much all of Australians, so shifting that two percentage points is actually quite a feat,” he said.

“We not only shifted minds and built those memory structures, which are critical, we had a bit of fun along the way and saw people really immersing themselves into the brand platform, but we also had the sales result as well.”

The campaign drove strong ad recall among the lucrative Gen Z audience, with at 72 per cent ­memorability, which helped ensure Mars was top of mind with consumers.

“There’s obviously a range of different competitors in the market, that have been around a long time, like Mars. The brand has a lot of heritage and is one of the big players within the chocolate bar category.

“This campaign gave the brand the opportunity to work with Amazon’s AI service and tap into new technologies,” said Mr Weisinger.

“With technology evolving at a rate of knots, we, as a organisation, have to be able to stay up to date and reach audiences who are also evolving and make sure we show up with our brand in a really relevant way.”

The campaign was created by WPP-owned media agency EssenceMediaCom.