Case Study: How Suzy Cultivates Consumer Loyalty (And Much More!) for Mars Wrigley

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The world-renowned candy brand turns to our insights capabilities to keep in touch with their most-valued commodity: the customer.

Though this may sound like a no-brainer in consumer-driven business, not all companies prioritize the consumer all the time. 

“I’ve actually heard this in my career: ‘We don’t have time to go to the consumer. We’ve got to get the product out there,’” says Lisa Saxon Reed, Global Director of Sensory at Mars Wrigley Confectionery. “I’m like, ‘What!? You don’t have time to talk to the consumer? How might that be true!?’”

Fortunately, Saxon Reed and the R&D squad at Mars Wrigley have been partnering with Suzy for years to “keep that consumer intimacy alive” — and it was an especially impactful partnership in the early days of 2020. 

Suzy’s quantitative and qualitative research capabilities facilitate the always-on insights that Mars Wrigley needed, allowing them to stay informed about how consumers were responding to the crisis and make necessary pivots at a necessary pace.

“I don’t want to do a big study that’s going to take me six months,” Saxon Reed says. By the end of a study like that, she continues, “especially in these rapidly changing times,” the consumer’s behavior may have already shifted. “The question I had six months ago may not be the question I have today to move the business forward.”

Prior to legislated lockdowns and mad dashes to the toilet tissue aisle, Mars Wrigley had already leaned on Suzy for a coterie of curated insights, helping the organization, as Saxon Reed says, “level-up” their understanding of a product and how consumers interact with it. 

An R&D team member there might ask a vetted Suzy respondent how they eat their Starburst candies. But because the answer is not at all obvious, they’d often ask more focused questions like whether or not they put the entire candy in their mouth and, if they do, if they bite into it a little bit or chomp it down before swallowing.

Why are these micro-details so important?

“Because depending upon what is the common behavior, it dramatically impacts what that means from a formulation perspective and what it means from a flavor and texture perspective,” Saxon Reed says. This kind of clarity allows Mars Wrigley R&D to advise other teams on whether or not they want to “support” the consumer behavior, as Saxon Reed says, or try to “switch it.”

“We’ve got to get into the consumer’s minds and hearts and understand what their dreams are,” she adds. “The best way to do that in my experience is at the very beginning — understanding their frame of reference and what they’re looking to do, what job, if you will, that they’re hiring a product to do.”

In addition to providing consumer behavior insights that have helped Mars Wrigley navigate pandemic conditions and, more generally, formulate an understanding of consumer-product interactions, Saxon Reed says Suzy also helps her R&D team explore consumer interest in new candy and snack innovation concepts.

Her “favorite” use of Suzy, however, is when the tool reacts to internal hunches and hypotheses. Suzy’s insights give teams across departments data to, as she says, “stop the swirl” of debilitating, business-halting debate, allowing decisions to finally be made.

And all this guidance comes at a speed unparalleled in the insights space, which doesn’t hurt Suzy’s viability. Apparently, it’s helped ensure a partnership with Mars Wrigley for the foreseeable future.

With Suzy, “No one’s going to tell me they don’t have time to talk to the consumer,” Saxon Reed says. “There is no excuse.”

To learn the many ways Suzy serves consumer-driven companies, take a peek at more client stories and Suzy testimonials.