Matthew Graham, global chief growth officer at Mars Food & Nutrition, knows his way around the company’s portfolio of brands. With more than 25 years at Mars, across global markets and different brands, he understands that to drive growth, you must focus on growing relevance.
“It is about maintaining a respect for the past while building connections and being relevant to younger consumers,” says Graham. “How do we make sure we’re continually innovating and meeting consumers’ needs across different occasions across different channels.”
Mars Food & Nutrition portfolio includes Ben’s Original, Dolmio in the UK and Australia, Seeds of Change, Kevin’s Natural Foods and more. Based on combined Mars and Kellanova 2025 net sales, Mars is a $65bn+ family-owned business with 170,000 Associates. As Graham looks to grow the food & nutrition business, he sees an opportunity to expand consumers’ consumption behaviors.
“Historically a lot of our portfolio played on the side of plate. Now we want to move closer to the center of the plate with full meal solutions,” he explains. “How do we innovate our way towards that and really drive those consumer occasions is important?”
His approach to communication is finding the right media mix in a fragmented media landscape to adapt to the digital world. “We learn as we go and learn by doing around AI because it’s changing by the week,” says Graham. “If we can unlock it and tap into that opportunity, we can reach consumers and engage with them at a much deeper level than we could have ever imagined even five years ago.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Graham from his office in London to discuss how he is driving growth in a fragmented media world, how they are thinking about Gen Z and why . This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are the missions that are driving these? And how does this show up in the creative that you’re putting out in the world to reach these consumers?
Mars builds brands around distinctiveness and consistency. It’s about how we drive relevance with today’s consumers and engage them in different ways. Those key principles haven’t changed, but how we meet consumers where they are, given how fragmented the media landscape is, has really changed. What we’ve tried to really focus on is building big consumer brand platforms that drive consistency for our brand communication and virtually all the touch points across. We talk a lot inside the business around the integrated consumer journey. If we get really strong platforms across all the brands, that helps us drive consistency and also allows us to show up the right way across that entire consumer journey.
It really drives compound interest. If you get the platform right from a creative point of view, you can build on it year-on-year, which ultimately helps build the equity of the brand. This ultimately ladders to really strong penetration, which is one of the core metrics that we place a lot of value on here.
For example, 12 months ago we launched a new brand platform for Ben’s Original 12 around Keep It Original, going back to the heartland around a simple, tasty, perfect every time. But showing meal solutions in a very contemporary way. There is a couple on a couch with their flatmate and they’re just doom scrolling through different meal solutions and the flatmate in the background is making a meal. All of a sudden they’re staring us in the face and say, ‘let’s go and eat that,’ and they sit down and have a really good meal. It’s a pretty simple formula, but it’s all about keeping it original. That’s what hangs the brand together.
You mentioned that you are trying to break through with Gen Z. Can you talk about the importance of showing up in culture to connect with consumers?
We have historically been a creative powerhouse. Creativity today is the No. 1 driver of growth for our brands. We really talk about how that ladders through to value creation. We want to make sure that we put humans at the heart of creativity. Technology becomes the enabler, but it’s not the other way around.
We’ve just gone through this big transformation around our media and marketing and we are making sure we have a really strong balance across paid, earned, shared and owned, and now commerce. That allows us to drive connected solutions to meet consumers where they are. Typically it’s a new generation of consumers that we’re trying to engage with our brands. Because if we’re not careful, a lot of CPG brands skew a lot older, and that’s how you get into repertoires from the past. That was the old media way. Today it’s about how we reach consumers where they are and engage them with more human-to-human influence, making sure we can have a two-way conversation with them, not just about the product, but the brand experience as a whole.
Can you talk about how you’re thinking about media in the fragmented landscape where consumers are engaging across channels?
Consumers today are spending 187 minutes on media consumed every day. Ten years ago it was 120 minutes. It’s increasing. So how do we cut through to really drive consistency and distinctiveness of the brand? We’ve tried to use technology, science and trends to shape the consumer’s insights around how we engage with them. We’re still a reach-based business.
Our growth philosophy is to target and personalize at scale to meet consumers where they are and engage them in two-way conversations. Historically we have started from paid, with a brief for our agencies. Now we’re now pushing the work much more from an earned and shared point of view to make sure that we get that seamless integration across to purchase. That’s probably one of the big shifts with the transformation around that moving.
Paid will still always play a big role but we want to make sure we’re front-loading earned and shared so we’re reaching consumers in a really engaging, meaningful way. The data, tech and AI will enable us to make sure we can seamlessly connect with consumers and have no dead ends.
What does consumer transformation mean from a purchase standpoint?
We’re seeing so many big shifts in the marketplace, certainly in food, so what we’ve stood up and put at the center of our strategy. Our overarching mission is tasty, accessible and healthy food that impacts people’s lives in a very positive way. Forty-eight percent of consumers in the U.S. still want to prepare meals in under 15 minutes and 80 percent of Americans don’t know what they’re having for dinner at three or four o’clock that day. We want to impact, interrupt and intersect those dinner-time decisions.
That’s how we get them on the consumer journey, how we reach them inside the store through category entry points, and how we reach them from a social media point of view across earned and shared to make sure we can interrupt that purchase decision. People are looking for convenience. They’re looking for tasty, accessible meals, but they want healthier solutions that are affordable. Our portfolio is geared toward that, even in light of some of the really disruptive things coming at us like GLP-1s. We know that taste, convenience and healthier solutions are only going to continue to elevate in consumers’ minds and importance.
How have your past experiences helped shape your perspective where you’re sitting right now?
I have been with Mars for 25 years now. I have worked across many geographies. I have been fortunate to have the experiences that I’ve had. My career has been built across marketing and sales. I have a big agenda internally – what I call the one demand approach inside the organisation – because without a really strong brand and portfolio plan and category vision, it’s hard for sales to sell and vice versa. It’s something that I’ve instilled through my whole career, even in the job I’m doing today – ensuring we create this end-to-end consumer experience. One of the other big learning times is around how we’re making sure that we’re connecting the dots and shifting the narrative from our marketers in the future around how they’re thinking about reaching consumers in a very different, disruptive way.
What are the marketing challenges that are like keeping you up at night and what are the marketing opportunities that you’re very excited about?
The emergence and the disruption of being a digital native is only going to accelerate. Therefore, the profile of a marketer is going to be fundamentally different. They need to be technology savvy, but they also need to make sure that they’ve got those foundational skills from a marketing and brand point of view that keeps us close to the consumer. How we find the balance between creativity, people and technology – in that order – is going to be critically important. I worry sometimes that we’re going to continue to see drift and some level of complacency and laziness, because we rely too much on technology. We’re going to lose the edge of creativity. One of the biggest challenges I’ve given my team is how do we capture attention and be really amazing storytellers in a two second world?
The AI trend disruption is only going to put more content out in the marketplace, but to be able to cut through that sea of vanilla is only going to get more challenging. What we’re trying to do with publishers is play across paid, shared and owned. It is going to be critically important to our future success. But we’re on the journey and we’re building the plane as we’re flying it around that.
The other challenge is around how do we measure the impact of that performance across paid and shared and owned in this new world? The reality of the brand function and the marketing function inside the organization needs to stay as relevant as it is to meet consumers on the other side. Sometimes the function can get deprioritised inside the organisation when we haven’t got the rigor and discipline around measurement and true return on investment. As we think about pushing across that consumer journey, we need to make sure our measurement is clear so that we can justify every dollar we’re spending.
