Mars.com

The Client

Mars operates as a global leader in confectionery, pet care, and food products with a significant corporate presence across multiple international markets. The Mars.com global corporate communications site serves as the primary source of information for the public to learn about the company, its history, brands, policies, initiatives like sustainability commitments, and current news. With operations spanning the globe, Mars maintains a complex digital ecosystem to communicate with diverse stakeholders including consumers, media, job seekers, and business partners.

The Situation

Mars’ fragmented digital presence caused significant challenges. The company operated 34 separate regional websites alongside its global Mars.com platform, each cloned from the global site but managed individually by regional editorial teams. This approach led to content inconsistencies and quality disparities between markets with different resource levels. Some regional sites remained unchanged since launch, while others struggled with dated technology, inconsistent designs, and outdated content that posed potential reputational risks. 

Additionally, the global site had accumulated significant technical debt as it evolved, with redundant fields, inconsistent approaches to page building, and limited layout options for content editors. Mars realized it needed to establish a unified digital ecosystem that would strengthen its global reputation while improving efficiency and governance.

The Challenge

Mars' digital consolidation effort confronted seven interrelated content and technical roadblocks:

• Sites had complex, inconsistent content management, with varying approaches used across different sections of the site
• Limited layout options and page components created confusion for content editors and required custom development for campaign pages
• Poor site performance, SEO, content findability, and accessibility compliance
• Fragmented governance with 34 regional sites requiring separate content management and updates
• Content inconsistencies and quality disparities across regional markets
• Complex requirements for balancing global corporate messaging with market-specific content
• Need for multilingual support with localized content relevant to each market

The Solution

Mars and EPAM Systems partnered with Weber-Shandwick for visual design and Essence Mediacom for SEO. Together, the teams rebuilt the digital foundation from the ground up, emphasizing modular design and centralized governance:

Platform rebuild: The team completed the global Mars website on Acquia Site Studio, starting with a fresh instance of Drupal and adding only necessary elements to ensure no technical debt carried forward from the original site.

Component standardization: The team cataloged, reviewed, and identified content and page components across the site, building unified approaches while eliminating redundancies. They reduced the number of components from 170+ to 48, creating a streamlined library of standardized, configurable Mars-specific components.

Enhanced editorial experience: Acquia Site Studio provided a centralized component library with an intuitive drag-and-drop page builder interface, making content creation more efficient. The team reworked roles, permissions, and publishing workflows to prepare for expanding the number of active content editors.

Unified "single site" approach: The solution extended the new Mars.com platform to function as a unified site supporting content needs for all 34 market websites, replacing individual regional sites while maintaining local relevance.

Custom content propagation: EPAM Systems built a custom solution that allows seamless distribution of content updates from global to market versions of pages using Drupal's translation subsystem, enabling central control of critical corporate content.

Granular permissions: The teams extended the system to interface with Acquia Site Studio components — enabling granular control and "locking" of content and allowing market editors to modify some aspects while preserving consistency in required global messaging.

Performance optimization: As part of the solution, the teams improved caching strategies to enhance performance while reducing costs and server impact.

The Results

Mars streamlined content architecture, boosted performance, and slashed content authoring time among other results. Specifically, the digital transformation project:

Simplified content architecture: Reduced the number of unique content types from 14 to only five, while decreasing component library complexity by 70% (from 170+ to 48 components).

Enhanced performance: The new platform achieved a 3.5x faster average response time than the legacy site and a higher than 93% Cloudflare cache rate, with error rates reduced to nearly zero and undesirable traffic cut by 50%.

Improved editorial efficiency: The unified platform allowed all markets to share stories faster, reducing content authoring time by 25%.

Increased global engagement: Site visitors increased globally by 20% post-launch, with nearly 200% growth in key reputation markets including Mexico, Germany, China, France, and the UK.

SEO resilience: Despite consolidating individual market sites into a single platform, organic traffic to Mars.com increased by 10% from the previous year, with market sites maintaining or improving their keyword rankings on Google SERP.

Enhanced accessibility: Scores improved across all markets, ensuring more inclusive access to Mars content worldwide.