The Client
Known for producing the world’s best-selling chocolate bar (Snickers), candy giant Mars is also an international leader in everything from pet food to pasta sauce.
With operations spanning the globe, Mars needed a digital experience sophisticated enough to communicate with a range of audiences – consumers, media, job seekers, and business partners – and drive better results in multiple languages.
The Situation
But Mars’ current digital ecosystem needed some work.
First, the central site — Mars.com — had accumulated significant technical debt over the years, with redundant fields, inconsistent page building, and limited layouts for content editors.
Secondly, the main site was supported by 34 regional clones, each managed by a different editorial team (with different resource levels).
The result was a confusing and inconsistent experience across audiences. Some sites remained unchanged since launch, while others struggled with dated technology, inconsistent designs, and outdated content.
Mars needed to bring the entire digital estate into one place to avoid risks to global reputation (while improving efficiency and governance at the same time).
The Challenge
Mars' digital consolidation effort faced several technical roadblocks:
- Complex, inconsistent content management
- Limited layout options and components, requiring custom development for campaign pages
- Poor SEO performance, findability, and accessibility
- Fragmented governance across 34 independent regional sites
- Inconsistent content quality leading to chaos and complexity across teams
- Balancing global messaging with local market needs
- Limited multilingual and localization support
Given the legacy issues that had accumulated over the years, the platform needed a ground-up rebuild for the main platform while consolidating the web of clone sites, making them easier to govern. This would allow a fresh start for the digital experience, and a solid foundation for improvements to overall content quality, performance, searchability and localization.
The Solution
For the platform rebuild, the Mars team and partners EPAM Systems, Weber-Shandwick and Essence Mediacom chose to use Drupal and Acquia Site Studio to rebuild the digital foundation from the ground up, emphasizing modular design and centralized governance.
The flexibility of Drupal allowed Mars to go fully custom when needed, adding only necessary elements to ensure no technical debt carried forward from the original site. Using a trusted open-source framework also allowed them to build confidently, minimising the future deprecation issues common with proprietary tools.
The next task was to address governance. One of Acquia’s core strengths is the ability to govern all sites in one place, which was perfect for helping Mars to standardise its portfolio of regional clones and manage its scale.
As part of this process, Mars was able to:
Unify the platform: The solution extended the new Mars.com platform to function as a unified site supporting content needs for all 34 clones, replacing individual regional sites while maintaining local relevance.
Standardize page components: 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.
Enhance the 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.
Reduce content chaos: 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.
Allow 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.
Optimize performance: As part of the solution, the teams improved caching strategies to enhance performance while reducing costs and server impact.
The Results
The results were sweet – Mars streamlined content architecture, boosted performance, and slashed content authoring time, reducing complexity across the entire digital experience and turning it into one source of truth for content.
Specifically, the 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.
Beyond the immediate metrics, the platform is now a unified, efficient experience that serves multiple audiences and independent regions at once, while maintaining governability and content standards.
Curious about the latest results? Discover more by visiting the Mars website here.