Mars talked innovation and sustainability. It skipped the psychology of why people snack. A former consultant says that gap explains the category's profit squeeze.
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Andrew Clarke, the president of Snacking Global at Mars, told The Wall Street Journal about the company's innovation priorities. He talked about new products, sustainability, and digital commerce. He did not talk about why people actually reach for a snack in the first place.
That omission stood out to Joan Kiddon, a partner at The Blake Project who consulted with Mars for decades. She remembers when the company commissioned an anthropologist and behaviorists to build a psychological and physiological framework for snacking behavior. That construct, she said, was universal. It covered the reasons people eat, not just what they eat.
Mars has always been the kind of company that invested in that kind of foundational research, Kiddon said. The projects on food physiology, sports nutrition, dental hygiene, and biochemistry were diligent and sometimes visionary. So hearing Clarke skip the "why" felt like a gap.
She contrasted the Mars interview with another WSJ conversation, this one with the president of Pepsi US Beverages. That executive peppered his answers with insights into consumer attitudes and behavior. The difference was sharp.
The timing matters. Companies that leaned into snack foods over core product lines are seeing profitability slip. Campbell Soup is taking hits on its snack division, which includes Goldfish and Pepperidge Farm. PepsiCo is working to keep interest in its Lay's line while its cola brand, Pepsi, loses ground to Coke. Weight-loss drugs and shifting attitudes toward snacking are squeezing the category.
Kiddon argued that brands need a more disciplined understanding of what people now need, value, and are willing to choose. The old Mars construct pointed to universal needs that still apply. Height, mouth feel, chewiness, time-of-day food needs – those product specs have an enormous impact on how people feel when they eat.
Marketing still succeeds or fails on behavior change, she said. Organizations exist to meet human needs. Revenues and profits follow when people believe a brand meets those needs better than the alternatives. Common sense, she added, is not common in brand management.
The Blake Project helps leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance, strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value.
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