Forget their awful Super Bowl ad - Snickers ‘won’ the entire NFL season with a brilliant product innovation

“Innovation is the ability to convert ideas into invoices.”

So said Lewis M. Duncan when he was Dean of the renowned U.S. Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, New Hampshire. Dr Duncan is a global leader in emerging technologies and maintains that innovation is only truly successful when it generates incremental income.

Which is exactly what Mars achieved with the Snickers Yard - a brilliantly simple product created exclusively for the 2016 NFL season. Sadly the same level of creative thinking was absent when it came to their Super Bowl halftime ad, but that's a story for another day.

A partnership with massive potential

Pro football is America’s favourite sport, just ahead of baseball with college football in third. During the regular season, playoffs and Super Bowl, it touches a reported 317 million households and taps into the nation’s culture in ways few things can.

Partnering with the NFL offers Snickers huge reach and provides a platform for it to increase its share of the $35bn U.S. confectionary market. In turn this could help Mars close the gap on Hershey in what is a very tight two-horse race for America's confectionery crown.

However, being the 2016 official chocolate sponsor of the NFL probably wasn’t cheap, and Snickers will have wanted to extract the maximum possible commercial value from a season lasting just 17 weeks. Which is why they had the Snickers Yard ready for the first round of games in September 2016.

A truly innovative product

The brilliance of this new product is its simplicity. Every yard counts in the NFL and the visual of green astroturf with white markings is an iconic American image that stands out on supermarket shelves - especially when it's 36 inches wide.

The yard-long box contains 18 bars in two plastic trays. Filling these trays with standard 1.86oz bars meant they didn't need to produce any new candy - just new packaging. Which is pretty much the textbook definition of innovation, a word that comes from the Latin innovare, meaning 'make into something new'. From almost nothing, an entirely new product was created that elegantly leveraged the NFL brand partnership.

Commercial winner

The most inspiring part of this story, at least for me, is that the product was both profitable and popular - a combination that means it was a sales and marketing success.

While on holiday in the U.S. at the end of 2016 (and online since then) the only official retailer I could find selling it was Walmart. Searching walmart.com for 'snickers' on the day before Super Bowl LI returned 20 products. I entered the product names, prices and weights (oz) into a Google spreadsheet and calculated the number of cents Snickers would make per oz of chocolate.

The screenshot below shows that aside from the 'NEW 24 bag of 0.76oz, 24 count' product being trialed, the Snickers Yard generates the greatest revenue by weight.

If you look back hard enough you can find that it has been sold by Walmart for as little as $9.98 (30c/oz). However, there's clearly plenty of room for profit, even at this level, given the products at the bottom of the table.

Importantly the Snickers Yard has been in high demand from enthusiast NFL fans. Since early December 2016, it's been 'sold out' for weeks at a time on walmart.com, and is currently going for $20 on Amazon and $28 on eBay. This suggests stocks were depleted even before the end of the season, leading to the conclusion that Mars must have made a very healthy profit.

The last bite

As an adopted son of Athens, Georgia - Go Dawgs! - I'm gutted the Falcons couldn't hold on their lead in the big game. And while I have no idea which team Lewis Duncan was supporting, I am confident he would consider the Snickers Yard an innovation winner.