The guest in this Humanizing Growth Series conversation is Andrew Clarke, global president of Mars Wrigley. Mars has been in business for more than a century and counts over 125,000 associates. Clarke came to the role through category and sales leadership and a spell as chief marketing officer, and the conversation uses that vantage point throughout.
The organizing idea is mutuality. It comes from a 1947 letter by Forrest Mars senior, which set out a mutuality of benefits and services. Clarke describes that vision as being about stakeholders across the whole chain rather than profit alone. The company now calls it mutuality of economics, and has just announced a foundation on it with Oxford’s business school.
Key findings
- The business is founded on five principles: quality, efficiency, mutuality, responsibility, and freedom. Clarke names mutuality and freedom as the two most distinctive, the latter because the company has stayed private for over a hundred years.
- Growth is defined on four dimensions rather than one: strong financial performance, quality of growth, trusted partner, and positive societal impact. Senior leadership’s long-term incentive is balanced across all four.
- Mars Wrigley has five brands above a billion dollars in sales.
- The single most important brand metric Clarke names is penetration, and he ties it to evidence-based marketing rather than to preference or affection.
- A study of the company’s own top 60 markets over seven years found that staying the course separated the consistent performers from the rest, ahead of every other behavior examined.
- The company paused some digital media investment and worked through the industry alliance on brand safety. Clarke states the trade-off directly: the decision put a societal choice before a profit choice, and some digitally native businesses declined as a result.
A principle written in 1947, still load-bearing
Mutuality is not a recent addition to this company. It comes from a letter written in 1947, which spoke of a mutuality of benefits and services. Clarke reads that as a stakeholder position long before the term existed, covering the whole chain rather than profit alone. It is now called mutuality of economics and it shapes daily decisions.
The purpose sits above it and the segments ladder into it. The corporate line is that the world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today. Pet care carries a better world for pets, and Mars Wrigley carries better moments and more smiles.
Four dimensions of growth, and the tension between them
Clarke’s definition of growth has four parts. Strong financial performance comes first, followed by quality of growth, meaning brands and categories with tailwinds behind them. The third is trusted partner, measured across associates, suppliers, customers, distributors, and NGOs. The fourth is positive societal impact, where sustainability sits.
The four are not a wish list. Long-term incentive for senior leaders is balanced across all of them, which Clarke says produces very difficult trade-off conversations. He defends the ordering too, quoting his chief executive: purpose without performance cannot be done. Financial strength is what buys the freedom to stay private and to invest for the long run.
What the company learned about its own consistent performers
Clarke describes a piece of internal research rather than a theory. The team broke the business into its top 60 markets and looked back seven years at each. The question was which units outperformed consistently across the whole period, rather than rising and falling.
Evidence-based practice was part of the answer, but not the whole of it. The other factors were behavioral: an enterprise approach that breaks silos, uncommon collaboration through different kinds of partnership, and placing bets on growth categories. Staying the course came first by a distance.
The gap Clarke identifies is between knowing and doing. The science and the logic point the same way, and organizations still fail to follow them, because they want a short-term return or are over-inflating an innovation. The company packaged the findings into a program it calls Growth Legacy and rolled it through its top markets.
Penetration over affection
Asked for the primary measure of brand success, Clarke picks penetration. He grounds it in the laws of growth and evidence-based marketing, and concedes the choice is contested. His justification is a failure mode rather than a theory: where the company did not focus enough on recruitment and penetration, it has sometimes lost a generation or a cohort of consumers.
The job he wants marketing to do
Clarke describes the CMO role as architect of growth and change agent, not as custodian of communications. The specific task is to bring the external confusion into the business, make sense of it, and turn it into strategy with a bias for action.
His instruction to marketing leaders is about the organization rather than the discipline. Marketing sits at the heart of everything and touches nearly every function, so it is the function best placed to break the silos and create the conditions for change. He says he still sees opportunities to connect the dots better inside his own business.
Principles when they cost money
Asked how a company embraces digital platforms while holding its principles, Clarke gives an example with a price attached. The company paused some investment and worked through an industry alliance for more transparency, auditing, and control. He is explicit that this put a societal choice before a profit choice, and that digitally native parts of the business declined because of it.
The pandemic produced a different kind of proof. A veterinary symposium that would normally draw a few thousand practitioners in person had 45,000 register online. Clarke offers it as evidence that doing things differently can widen reach and serve the whole industry.
The regret, and the leadership behind it
Clarke’s stated regret is not a wrong decision but a slow one. His learning is to go faster on the long term. The method he proposes is small, provable bets that give the organization confidence and can then be scaled.
He describes his own leadership as continuing to learn. In his phrasing he was learning to lead early in his career and is now leading to learn. His stated first responsibility is building the team and creating the environment, with real clarity of strategic vision. His single takeaway for the audience is to be obsessively curious.
Scope and limitations
This is a live conversation with one executive about his own company, and the account is his. The top 60 markets study is described in the conversation but not published in it, so no method, sample definition, or effect size is available here. Clarke also concedes the company has not resolved the mutuality question itself, and that the principle is asking hard questions of large businesses rather than answering them.
The trade-offs are stated without figures. The decline attributed to pausing platform investment is not quantified, and neither is the attrition of consumer cohorts he blames on insufficient focus on penetration. The source is an automatic caption track of speech, with no speaker labels and frequent mistranscription of names.
Source
This page summarises HGS #7: Andrew Clarke talks about growth and the role of marketing today, by Institute for Real Growth.