This Much I Learned: M&S on how consistency is fuelling its transformation

A high street staple for 140 years, M&S has been on a mission to enhance its style and value perceptions as part of its ongoing “transformation” – a project with consistency at its heart.

The retailer faced hard times after dropping out of the FTSE 100 in 2019 and embarked on a transformation programme in 2021. Fast forward to 2023 and it’s back in the FTSE 100, reporting a 17.2% rise in profits year on year and last month was crowned Marketing Week’s Brand of the Year.

Sharry Cramond joined in 2018 as marketing director for food, while Anna Braithwaite was appointed marketing director for clothing and home in 2021. Both have endeavoured to maintain consistency while rebuilding brand perceptions.

“We had to make sure everything we created was compelling, engaging and unique,” says Cramond.

Marks & Spencer wins Brand of the Year accolade

She brought back the ‘Not just food’ tagline, for example, to be consistent with the brand’s heritage.

Braithwaite similarly sees consistency as “essential”, which for clothing and home means “always being there through each season”, with style at the heart. She notes brand buzz is at a “record high”, which she puts down to “consistency in style of advertising” and collaborations, including sellout collections from the likes of Bella Freud and Sienna Miller. 

The marketer has been leading M&S’s style refresh, after previously admitting the brand had “lost its way”. The refresh has involved the upcoming launch of a curated clothing store in Battersea. As Braithwaite says: “If we don’t have style, we don’t have anything”.

“Our customers know that if they come into M&S, they’ll find something exciting and stylish. From our perspective, we’ve got to own that. We’re early on in the journey, so for us now it’s about sticking to it…the consistency is something that will show up a lot more going forwards,” she adds.

M&S has got to find a way to keep up and remain relevant.

Anna Braithwaite, Marks & Spencer

Similarly for food, according to Cramond everything the brand does has “product at the heart of it”. The team involves ex-FMCG brand mangers looking after each individual brand platform, including Percy Pig, Colin the Caterpillar and Plant Kitchen.

For Cramond, quality, value and relevance are the three key factors driving the success of the M&S Food brand. She explains quality perceptions have risen by 13 percentage points and millions has been invested to bring down prices, while demonstrating the range of products available, which aren’t just sandwiches and fresh meals.

She describes the retailer’s partnership with ITV on ‘Cooking with the Stars’ as the most successful ad-funded programme in UK history, which has “changed perceptions” of M&S as a place to do a broader shop.

Now enjoying its 13th consecutive quarter of growth, the brand faced a tricky time in the pandemic, with Braithwaite saying Covid – alongside the changing landscape of the high street – meant the marketers “had to get people back in love with the brand” through a “relentless, persistent programme”.

However, Cramond explains it was during the pandemic M&S began to ramp up its focus on giving “ultra-local information” via social media, at a time where what people wanted from marketing was “very different to any other time in history”.

Store social media accounts were created with colleagues front and centre, and that’s still key to M&S’s social strategy today.

“The number one thing driving value perception is word of mouth, driven by user generated content on TikTok,” says Cramond.

‘Positive dissatisfaction’

Alongside colleague voice, the brand also gets customer voice across through focus groups and a food collective – another feedback group for shoppers, which received 45,000 signups in its first 40 minutes.

Discussing what makes M&S’s marketing memorable, Braithwaite recalls her “clothing focused memories” with her mother and grandmother, while Cramond describes this as her “dream job” after finding M&S Food “incredible” growing up. Going forward, both want to appeal to the younger generation and meet them where they are, which is social media.

Braithwaite explains the “market is changing massively” through social shopping and that M&S has to find a way to remain relevant, while staying true to its values.

“The digital landscape is changing, but the next couple of years will be reinforcing what we’ve already been trying to establish,” she adds.

Going forward, the two marketing directors – despite being in separate divisions – will continue to work “in constant communication”, amid a company culture focused on what Cramond describes as “positive dissatisfaction” in service of delivering the best experience for customers.

From opening up about mental health issues to closing the career confidence gap, you can listen to previous episodes of Marketing Week’s This Much I Learned podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud and Spotify.