MARS Cosmetics is taking its “Living the MARS Life” campaign beyond screens and into the streets, creating experiences that allow consumers to encounter the campaign in their everyday lives.

In Mumbai, MARSIE, the official MARS Cosmetics mascot, took to the city’s roads in a specially branded cab for three days, travelling across iconic locations including Marine Drive and the Sea Link, meeting consumers and becoming part of the city itself. The idea was simple: if Living the MARS Life is about finding moments that are entirely your own, MARSIE should get out and live them too. 

Suramya Patsaria, Marketing Manager, MARS Cosmetics, said, “Living the MARS Life is about turning everyday moments into experiences that feel uniquely yours. With MARSIE, we wanted to bring that idea to life on Mumbai’s streets and let people experience the campaign beyond the screen.” 

In Delhi, MARS partnered with Giani’s to bring the campaign into another everyday consumer moment. The MARS x Giani’s canter travelled across parts of Delhi, creating an unexpected intersection of beauty, indulgence and everyday city life while engaging directly with consumers.

Tanya Rashi, Marketing Manager, MARS Cosmetics, said, “With Giani’s, one of India’s most loved ice cream brands, we wanted to bring Living the MARS Life into a familiar everyday moment. The canter gave us a fun way to bring two brands together and create an experience that consumers could enjoy and engage with.” 

Together, the two experiences reflect MARS’ larger ambition with Living the MARS Life: to move beyond communicating a campaign and create moments that people can experience, participate in and remember.

The kiosk located in Mumbai is a part of MARS Cosmetics’ vision to create high-profile retail places that are led by consumer experiences where they can discover, test, and connect with the large and diverse Indian skin tone makeup of the affordable luxury brand. MARS is still committed to physical retail as a major driver of brand trust and conversion, while beauty consumers are increasingly looking for trial-based experiences in color cosmetics, making it so that the brand is still the main supplier of the need for this kind of experience. 

MARS Cosmetics, which is expanding its Exclusive Brand Outlet kiosks, has not only established a strong market position but also partnered with leading modern trade and beauty retail chains such as Health & Glow, Dabur NewU, Pantaloons, Shoppers Stop, and Lulu Blush. This strategy, which consists of the exclusive brand-owned formats combined with the large-scale retail partnerships, has made the brand capable of building a robust omni-channel infrastructure that can keep an equilibrium amongst the aspects of reach, visibility, and a uniform consumer experience.

Elaborating on the expansion, Pushpa Kandpal, Sr. Manager of EBO Operations & expansion at MARS Cosmetics, stated, “Offline retail is one of the main channels through which Indian consumers get their beauty products, and this is true especially for makeup, where trial and shade discovery are very important. Our Exclusive Brand Outlets are not only the place where we can display our whole range of products, but also the time when we can interact with customers and give them a beauty experience. The opening of our 45th EBO in Mumbai is an indicator of the positive response we are getting in the markets and also evidence of our determination to provide high-quality and luxury makeup at affordable prices all over India.”

The brand is certainly experiencing powerful growth in its offline expansion due to the continuing demand coming from metro and Tier-1 cities. The company has set a target of having 60 Exclusive Brand Outlets across the country by the end of the current financial year, which is a sign of its belief in the physical retail business as a long-term growth driver even when digital commerce is growing at a fast rate.

MARS Cosmetics is still very much a consumer-focused beauty brand that can easily adapt to the changes in the Indian makeup consumer base by introducing new products, making them available for everyone, and selling them at reasonable prices as it expands its retail presence.