Rebranding To Stay Relevant

Acosta Group helps Mars Food successfully relaunch its flagship product line.

HOW WE DID IT

Mars decided to rebrand and relaunch one of its flagship brands. They trusted Acosta Group as a key execution arm of this important relaunch with national implications.

Acosta Group engaged at multiple levels of its organization to provide a suite of customized solutions to support Mars’ go-to-market objectives fully.

First, Acosta Group hub and team leaders played an integral role in the project by facilitating and participating in top-to-top meetings with some of the largest retailers in the industry, advocating the uniqueness of this relaunch and helping negotiate re-introductory fees for our client. Mars credits their participation in helping to reduce slotting fees by over $1.3 million. These cost savings could be reinvested into other launch elements to improve speed-to-shelf and awareness.

Acosta’s Headquarter Sales teams rewrote the promotion plans to help sell through the old packaging more quickly and create a smoother supply flow of newly branded packaging. They collaborated with Acosta’s Space Management and Business Intelligence teams to execute a comprehensive and corresponding sales strategy to use the occasion to close core voids and launch innovation that grew post-launch total distribution points (TDPs) versus pre-launch metrics.

On-shelf availability of the brand in such a launch is paramount. To that end, Acosta’s Mosaic PRO division designed and reprinted instant redeemable coupons (IRCs) and shelf pusher point of sale (POS) displays with the new branding to be distributed to retail teams to place in stores. In fact, in eight weeks, the retail execution teams covered over 15,350 stores and re-tag over 226,800 items. They placed over 404,000 on-pack IRCs and re-branded over 230,000 shelf pusher trays.

Our Acosta Group Digital Commerce team continuously verified and updated content on e-commerce sites to include images of the rebranded products and updated product messaging as designed by our client.

With Acosta Group’s comprehensive and strategic approach, we have helped Ben’s Original increase distribution and sales since the relaunch. The TDPs are 34% higher than pre-relaunch, and annual net sales have increased by double digits in both units and dollars since the relaunch. Additionally, we saved Mars over $1.3 million in slotting and re-slotting fees, significantly impacting its bottom line. As a result of this work, we were proud to be recognized by the client as part of their Regional Grocery Team of the Year.