If you found yourself travelling the byways of Northern England in the late 19th century you might have passed him. Wrapped up in many layers to protect against long nights on the road. Weighed down with a large wooden box that he always carried. Michael Marks, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, wandered far and wide.

Marks spent his first few years in England walking to all the market towns around Yorkshire, going as far north as Durham. He was looking for local fairs and markets. On discovering one, he would set up his pedlar’s tray by hanging it from his neck to display his wares. Marks initially spoke no English, so he traded under a slogan already inscribed on the front of his tray: ‘Don’t Ask the Price – It’s a Penny.’

What the young pedlar lacked in language he made up for in nascent marketing skill. While other pedlars sold any old tat, Marks quickly worked out what products were deemed good value for a penny. He borrowed money and expanded penny bazaars across Yorkshire and Lancashire, and in 1894 he went into partnership with Tom Spencer, who brought financial skill and an all-important gentile surname to the masthead. The business continued to prosper, expanding further and further south until Marks’s untimely death in 1907.

After that tragic event, there was much talk of breaking up the now prosperous Marks & Spencer business. But Simon, Michael’s teenage son, would have none of it. It was Simon Marks who would become the most important and successful British retailer of the 20th century. And it was Simon, later Sir Simon, who would create the network of stores that would make M&S famous. He would also name his private label range St Michael, after a father who died worn out by hard work.

Two key ‘co-ordinates’

Right from the very beginning, Marks & Spencer set its course for growth from two twin stars: quality and value. While these attributes might appear generic, the trick at the heart of the M&S story was and still is to recognise that each holds the other in stasis. Just as Michael Marks had offered goods that were only a penny to buy but also very good value to own, M&S specialised not in being the cheapest or the most high-end. Rather, in an early exemplar of relative differentiation, M&S won its market with the hybrid offering of better quality and better value at the same time. The brand prospered in the century ahead by using these simultaneous co-ordinates to chart a path to greatness.

Examples of how this strategy played out are replete across the M&S history. The company established exclusive contracts with British suppliers ensuring both customised levels of ever-improving quality and the very best supply prices. In the 1930s, when M&S first sold roller skates, its employees tried out the new technology after store hours, concluding that the skates were “great fun” but also “very good value” for five shillings. It was a very M&S way to assess things.

Tastings at the company HQ on London’s Baker Street were attended by all the senior executives, and focused not only on the price of new products but whether they tasted significantly better than any of the other alternatives on the high street. When a clothing executive wanted to show you the M&S difference, he started with the price of a sweater and then turned it inside out to show you the quality of the stitching. An M&S jumper was not just well priced, it was also built to last. Everything from stretch-strap lingerie to fridge-fresh chicken was sold on the basis that it was both good quality and good value at the same time.

After World War II, the company invested heavily in man-made fabrics that performed better and proved cheaper than traditional natural clothing. When British households discovered wine, M&S was there to offer rather good French reds and whites at very reasonable prices. Wine, like most other departments, used the St Michael private label for most of its products, often appearing with the words quality and value embossed underneath.

Your humble correspondent in 1979.

For working-class families, M&S was a way to strive for more while making budgets balance. That was certainly the case at 13 Eden Drive where – up to the age of 18 – your humble columnist grew up on an exclusive diet of M&S chili con carne followed by St Michael’s Battenberg cake, spending every waking hour in an array of its children’s clothing. If you had cut me open at any point during the 1970s, the words St Michael would have been clearly visible running right down my middle.

If M&S veered too much towards the quality side at the expense of value, as it infamously did during the late 90s, the company’s sales would immediately decline as shoppers migrated to lower-priced players like Tesco. And when the brand became too value-obsessed it lost its higher-end allure and customers moved to brands like Waitrose. Provided that fine branding balance was maintained, however, M&S was perfectly placed to prosper through the 20th century, as a burgeoning middle class enjoyed an increased disposable income that allowed them to diversify their tastes into avocados, frozen food, ready meals and whatever else modern British culture became accustomed to.

‘We’re going in the right direction’: M&S on brand reappraisal and the transformation journey

Changing times

Despite their apparent simplicity, however, both value and quality have the same specific drawback: they are very broad cultural concepts. What quality meant to your mum or your nana in 1974 was very different from what it means today. And as a new century unfolded, a raft of retail entrants made those definitions even more tenuous and mercurial.

In clothing, new brands like Zara, H&M and Topshop changed the business model and with it the fashion expectations of a nation. In food, Tesco grew into a behemoth with a ‘good, better, best’ approach to private label that threatened the one-dimensional St Michael offer. German discounters Aldi and Lidl were aggressively challenging basket prices, private label definitions and the market’s perception of good value.

The company hired two astonishing marketers to turn around the fortunes of the high street icon.

M&S found itself increasingly in the middle. Rarely the place any brand wants to be. By 2020, its share of UK grocery sales had fallen to 3%. Clothing was in even more dire shape and many speculated it was only a matter of time before M&S closed that side of the business completely. The company’s share price dropped to a sixth of the value it had held only 10 years earlier and at the end of the year the company reported a loss of £87.6m – the first in its history.

And it was from this remarkably dicey place that M&S began an unlikely but ultimately triumphant turnaround. Behind the scenes, retail legend Archie Norman took over as chairman. Stuart Machin came on board to run food and ultimately become CEO. And crucially, the company hired two astonishing marketers to turn around the fortunes of the high street icon.

In 2018, Sharry Cramond returned from successful senior marketing stints in Australia and America to become marketing director for food. Then in 2021, Anna Braithwaite jumped ship from Tesco to become marketing director for clothing and home. In a quite breathtaking period, this new team, with remarkable marketing skill, has restored the fortunes of the ailing British retailer in a manner that even the famously taciturn Simon Marks would surely have approved of. Equally importantly, if they will forgive me for saying it, the two marketers grew up in solid M&S households, enabling them to grasp the power and potential of the brand from birth.

M&S’s 10 steps to success

Now, after 13 consecutive quarters of growth, M&S is a brand with a trajectory. In October, it was BrandZ’s 2024 UK brand of the year thanks to a whopping 38% increase in brand equity. Last Thursday, Marketing Week crowned it Brand of the Year – the highest accolade this title can bestow. I sat down with the dream marketing duo of Cramond and Braithwaite after the announcement to talk transformation and tactics. Here are my 10 big takeaways that explain much – certainly not all – of M&S’s turnaround triumph.

1. Positioning first

M&S had flopped about for a decade before Archie Norman arrived. Different marketers came and went with different visions for the brand. But it’s clear that both Cramond and Braithwaite have done a proper diagnosis first. They went through the M&S archive. They talked to customers both loyal and lapsed. And they worked their way through enormous amounts of perceptual data. All to get to the same place where Michael Marks intuitively landed more than a century ago.

“We never talk about value without also talking about quality,” Cramond explained to me last week. And it’s clear that in every respect M&S is partly back to its best because its marketers understand the brand’s appeal, can articulate it and can execute on it. If that sounds an easy ask, check out my Starbucks column from last week.

2. Advertising half-life

One of the more recent discoveries in the effectiveness literature is the abject lack of evidence that ads wear out over time. Your best ad from 10 years ago is probably still your best and most effective ad today, irrespective of your ridiculous desire to keep producing new and less impressive work. M&S had the confidence to step back and recognise that one of its earlier campaigns – the famous ‘food pornography’ ads – was better than anything it could produce today and just as powerful as it was back in 2006.

If anything, the new ads improve on the originals by delivering the message through apparently real consumers and with significantly more humour. System1’s Andrew Tindall recently talked about the power of creative consistency, and M&S joins the likes of Specsavers and McDonald’s in recognising you don’t big new ideas to enjoy big new growth. In fact, the opposite usually applies. Old ads – perhaps updated, perhaps not – are a fantastically fruitful opportunity for every brand. Kudos to M&S for going backwards to move forwards.

M&S brings back ‘This is not just food’ campaign after a 12-year absence

3. Constant brand revitalisation

You can take the logic of old ads too far, of course. Ultimately the challenge of brands that are decades rather than years old is that they need to be revitalised. Note the difference between brand revitalisation and repositioning here. Like all great brands, M&S has no need to change its inherent position. But the paradox of time means that it must alter and evolve the interpretation and execution of it to stay fresh and successful.

Too many insecure marketers take control of dusty, iconic brands and are too petrified to change anything. Other, more arrogant, marketers throw the positioning baby out with the tactical bathwater and decide everything has to change, embarking on a grand repositioning. M&S was too smart for that. Aside from grasping the core concepts of quality and value again, the team also knew that those coordinates meant something different to a British family in 2024 versus earlier iterations.

The store has moved its fashion sourcing from almost exclusively British to an array of countries that include Sri Lanka, Turkey and Vietnam, as both quality and value demand new sourcing strategies. Similarly, with food, quality now stretches to issues like animal welfare, sustainability and supporting British farmers – issues that earlier generations of M&S executives barely considered. But when a company is more than a century old, the paradox of brand management is that you have to change your tactical execution to stay true to your perennial brand values.

4. The power of ESOV

I’m not a big one for laws of marketing. We work in too reflexive a discipline. But if there is one concept that does hold broadly true across categories, markets and decades it’s the idea of excess share of voice (ESOV) – the notion that if you want to grow sales and profits you need a greater share of media spend in your category than your current market share.

In the case of M&S, there was a conscious commitment to ensure excess. That sounds simple, but when your market share is dwindling and profits are disappearing, the courage to invest more into advertising is a key moment in reversing your decline. And ESOV was a decision that M&S was acutely and explicitly aware of. Yes, measuring SOV is a pain in the ass. Yes, it’s always approximate. Yes, even more so with walled gardens and digital spend. And yes, grocery ad spend and market share is an easier category than most to run the numbers. But it does not stop ESOV being one of the key contributing factors in growth and an essential dashboard metric for every well-trained marketer.

5. The power of EESOV (with two Es)

Confusingly, Kantar cites another ESOV in its expert assessment of how M&S grew its brand. But the E in its acronym does not mean ‘excess’. When Kantar says ESOV, it means effective share of voice. For Kantar, it is one thing to invest in advertising media, quite another to do so with creative quality, given creative is the number-one driver of effectiveness that marketers can control.

The idea of effective SOV will get a lot of CMOs very excited, because I know of at least a dozen who want to grow share but also aren’t being given the budget to achieve excess and actually do it. Most are trying to ‘cheat’ excess SOV by using all manner of effectiveness hacks, ranging from attention to cross-media to codification, to make their media work harder than their budget might suggest it can.

Kantar is, of course, right – you need good creative. But more media via higher investment also helps. Let’s call it EESOV and you can pick which E comes first. Certainly M&S benefited a little from excess share of voice and a lot more from effective share of voice, as the Kantar chart focusing on the grocery sector indicates.

6. Diverse media mix

Both marketers at the helm of M&S are clear that the media mix has never been more diverse than it is right now. What impresses me most about the M&S approach is the ability of the team to ignore silly debates about digital versus traditional or earned versus owned media, and simply do all of it in the service of the brand.

Take video, for example. M&S worked with ITV to create ‘Cooking with the Stars’, the most successful ad-funded show in TV history. It continues to embrace TV advertising, as evidenced by the recent Dawn French Christmas opus. And its TikTok approach, in which each of its thousand stores is encouraged to devise and post its own video content direct to the site, has changed the way retailers in this country think about and utilise social video.

But the broader message is that diversity works best across a media mix freed from restrictive labels like ‘performance media’ or ATL. They are all tools at your disposal and the more, the merrier.

‘High-performance culture’: M&S marks ‘new beginnings’ with ITV partnership

7. In-house creative

M&S also demonstrates another recent megatrend in marketing. All the creative work for its Food business is now done in-house (Mother handles Clothing and Home). There is a lot of precious talk about the limitations and failings of in-house work, deriving mostly from spurned external agencies desperate for another crack. The bar charts don’t lie. More and more big brands are seeing the value of in-house agency operations in improved speed, economy and control.

There is no doubt that there will be a role for big full-service creative agencies, now and into the future. But the in-house revolution is here to stay. And why not? No one looking at the new Dawn French Christmas ad for M&S would have guessed this was all done without external input. But, like a good M&S pie, you don’t need external brands to make things fantastically satisfying.

8. Always on

Traditionally, M&S has proven promotionally strong for the all-important pre-Christmas months and then all the way through to spring. But usually the company would cut back its media spending for summer. Not any more. Embracing an always-on philosophy, M&S now advertises right through the summer months and joins the circle back to the festive run-up.

That’s had a huge impact, partly because summer clothing has become a key strength for M&S where once it was a weakness. But it also illustrates the often discussed power of maintaining spend across the full year and avoiding the flighting approach once deemed more effective.

9. The most important ‘P’

Despite the focus on advertising and communications, both M&S marketing directors are keen to stress that their teams are involved in more strategic fare and across the tactical Ps. They estimate only about 20% of their time is devoted to communications. And partly because much of what M&S sells is its own private-label products, the marketing teams are heavily involved in product development and assessment as part of their remit.

Braithwaite’s fix of M&S clothing, for example, began with a study of every single clothing SKU that M&S produced. More than a quarter of a million customers were involved as the marketing team assessed the whole product range. Again, it would be incorrect to portray M&S marketers as being in charge of the M&S products. But they are heavily involved in product choice, improvement, promotion and deletion. As all good marketers should be.

Ritson: Product is the P all marketers should strive to influence

10. What next?

When I asked both marketing directors what they saw ahead for 2025, both essentially said the same thing. Neither is going to change their strategy or execution that much going forward. It’s a surefire signal of strong marketers who have built a winning strategy and are now ‘holding the wheel’ for more incremental success.

Agility has a place with tactical opportunities. But beware those marketers who leap from initiative to initiative like a drunken handyman. Success takes at least a decade and, once you have the right coordinates in view and a winning strategy in place, the correct course of action is to keep doing what you are doing and resist the temptation to add or change much. And that appears, delightfully, to be the plan for M&S and the decade ahead. More of the same…

Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, five-time PPA columnist of the year, and the founder of the Mini MBA in Marketing which covers (almost) all of these lessons in its upcoming April course. He still (proudly) wears M&S underpants.