Manufacturers and retailers have forever been in a power struggle to balance their relationship for mutual gain. They are locked into this power struggle because they have this thing called “the shopper” who counts on both of them to serve their needs.

The challenge is to make sure that the shopper experience is what the shopper wants, as opposed to who has the upper hand in negotiating the relationship between the manufacturer and the retailer.

This has been elusive for the industry. It’s like a tug of war between two behemoths with a red cloth tied in the middle of the rope. The cloth keeps moving back and forth over the center line, but nobody’s pulled the other into the water yet.

The shopper keeps that cloth in the right spot by forcing both sides to maintain functional equilibrium. The biggest struggle is adding value to that equation so that we can keep the two sides working together.

Campbell’s “Labels for Education” program is a perfect example of how Mars, our clients and retailers have worked together. The first thing that Campbell’s incorporates is the fifth “P,” which is Purpose. We’ve always spoken about the four “Ps” in this business and the fifth “P” is becoming ever more present. Why are we doing this, what do we stand for and how deeply do we stand for it?

Campbell’s has a great portfolio of products that goes beyond soups, beverages and snacks. It is as wholesome as you can get as a company. The idea is to take that wholesomeness and provide supportive resources for education, which is a crushing need right now.

About two years ago, Campbell’s gave us the opportunity to re-invigorate their great program to support American education and foster learning. Campbell’s values the shopper-marketing space and has made a commitment to it at a senior level. They are committed to what we’re doing to evaluate, measure, re-energize and then improve it each year.

We have redefined “Labels for Education” to bolster learning overall, and enrichment programs in particular. It’s now even more relevant with arts, academics and athletics. This is based on shopper research that says that parents care about their kids’ extra-curricular activities, which are all being cut. Research shows that kids who are involved in enriching afterschool programs, perform better academically over time.

Campbell’s has allowed us to go out and secure a relationship with the Grammy Foundation, which is committed to bringing music into schools. They have allowed us to develop other relevant partners, so that we have an even better solution for the retailer and the shopper.

To do this, we have vertically integrated our community of companies at Mars: Our digital, fulfillment, custom-publishing companies and our social-marketing division are involved, as well as our shopper-marketing business, which is central to what we do.

We’re doing the right thing for the right people with a product that is absolutely central to people’s lives. We are touching the shopper in so many different ways — whether it’s through their academic, digital, or store environment — with the retailer as our partner.

The fifth “P” is something we all need to be thinking about. Young people today want to know what these companies stand for. If they don’t stand for anything, they are not as attached to them. And it’s not just young people. Some of the biggest participants are grandparents. It’s a multi-generational program.

At Mars, we are always thinking about “could we,” or “what if” or “how about.” If somebody walks into my office and says: “I’ve got a great idea,” it doesn’t involve a board meeting and red tape to get an approval to try it. That’s part of the undercurrent of everything that happens here.

There is a tremendous amount of passion that manifests itself in healthy tension. I don’t mind if voices are raised and people are going at it in a professional way. It is a very passionate culture here. People care deeply about what happens.

Our clients, in many ways, have created that because our clients are good. They care; they send thank-you notes. They appreciate good work and there is nothing like the appreciation from a client to inspire even more great work.

It’s a pretty down-to-earth environment at Mars. We keep our doors open and answer our own phones. We are committed to being as smart an organization as possible and that translates to a tremendous commitment to resources in research and planning.

We started off as more of an executional-based resource. We have now coupled that with a highly developed strategic resource. We continue to add powerful channel people to our company, but we’ve added a significant layer of account planners, too.

As the shopper-marketing discipline grows, the agency-client relationship will increasingly mirror the way the marketing department works with their ad agencies. We’ve added about 15 planners at various levels in the last 12 months.

We have three sister companies that are aligned with the digital space as well as a huge commitment to digital shopper marketing. We are providing social-marketing solutions in the shopper-marketing environment, for example. We are now tapping into the social-marketing network for each retailer across the US and Canada to begin to seed our clients’ products within social communities.

We had been primarily a consumer packaged-goods agency in the classic food, drug, and mass arenas. We were almost 100 percent classic CPG in terms of our billing and it’s now maybe 60 percent of our billing.

We are expanding into health services, for example. We are seeing consumer-electronics clients coming into the fold with significant changes in the way they are marketing through conventional retail.

We want to be a single-source supplier for clients who want to handle everything from product development and package design right through planning, communications, social networking, warehousing, fulfillment, digital strategies, back-end, search engine optimization and marketing.

We are also expanding internationally and are committed to opening up an office in London in the next 60-90 days, which is our first outside the North American continent. We do have an office in Toronto, but I see the international market adopting shopper marketing quickly.

Then there’s the world of analytics, which is probably the most elusive part of shopper marketing. Analytics is woven into everything that we’re doing and we’re going to see more and more back-end focus as well as front-end focus.

We have an internal mantra of unleashing the potential of ourselves and our clients. Externally, my challenge to our people is to be the smartest, most connected person in the room, who can provide a breadth of solutions that nobody else in the room would be able to provide. We are doing that through training and research, so that we are as connected to the consumer and shopper as we can possibly be.

We believe that the evolution of shopper management is the next phase of shopper marketing. There are going to be some executional resources that everybody is going to need to have, but more importantly there are going to be strategic resources that are aligned with the brand and interpreted for the retailer.

Mars Advertising is evolving shopper marketing into a truly strategic discipline within the manufacturer’s operations. We are a performance-based culture. We are business people and we are here to produce results for our clients.