Mars Petcare Improves Engagement 10x with Xamarin

In 1911, Frank C. Mars made the first Mars candies, establishing Mars’ roots as a confectionery company. The company, based in McLean, Virginia, now has a presence in 74 countries, generating net sales of more than $33 billion a year.

Mars Petcare, one of the company’s six lines of business, is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, and is one of the world’s leading pet care providers, employing more than 35,000 associates representing over 41 brands, including industry giants PEDIGREE®, IAMS®, and WHISKAS®. To keep sales representatives and other customer-oriented personnel up to date, they created a sales portal to access marketing collateral, training information, and their own private social network.

Hoping that a move to mobile would increase the use of the previously web-based sales portal by sales associates and distributors, Mars Petcare turned to Fortuitas, a Xamarin Premier Consulting Partner. Using the Xamarin Platform and Xamarin.Forms, Fortuitas and Mars created a cross-platform iOS and Android app that shares 100% of its code.

“Our ability to use Xamarin to create all of the user interface using the same code across platforms was a major time saver,” Kurtz says. “The 100% code sharing reduced our total development time for the iOS and Android apps by at least 50%.”

Mars is more than pleased with the results, with sales representatives and other users valuing the newfound ease with which they can access and share blogs, collateral, and other materials and collaborate socially to help build a sense of community.

“Initially there were just a few hundred people using the portal,” Kurtz says. “After deploying the mobile app, those numbers skyrocketed to almost 3,000 users. We’ve been told that people love it because it provides the true mobile user experience they needed to access high- value content.”

 

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