case study 3 1 marks & spencer

The Marks & Spencer eCommerce Case Study: 3 Growth Lessons for Retailers

The Marks & Spencer eCommerce case study serves as an inspiration to every eCommerce marketer. The old saying: “It’s better late than never,” comes to mind. It’s a tale of failures and comebacks. That’s what makes the Marks and Spencer eCommerce story so interesting.

eCommerce 101: Why you need to create a seamless shopping journey

The history of a retail giant.

• The Marks and Spencer eCommerce strategy for scaling growth

eCommerce growth lessons for every eCommerce Manager

• Marks and Spencer business stats you should know
• Breaking news about Marks and Spencer

In Conclusion

The company arrived late and unprepared for the online scene. In fact, Marks and Spencer weren’t selling online until the mid-2000s. Consequently, lagging behind the competition, the company announced an 8.1% drop in sales and resulting share price dip in July 2014.

Following drastic drops in revenue, the CEO and other senior figureheads pointed the blame at Mark and Spencer’s eCommerce platform. The company’s website relaunch, two years in the making, was a bust.

Customers complained that Marks and Spencer’s relaunched website had dysfunctional and un-clickable checkout buttons (as the below video demonstrates), difficult-to-use search filters for size, limited product availability, items disappearing from shoppers’ baskets during checkout, delivery forms excluding major cities, and so on. In simple words, Marks and Spencer was far away from eCommerce checkout best practices .

As a result of poor eCommerce experience, by 2018, the retail giant was considerably behind its competition. 

Only 18.5 % of its clothing and home sales were online. With an annual growth of 5%, Marks and Spencer wasn’t going to come close to its 2022 growth target of 33%. Store closures were soon announced.

However, the losses resulted in designing and implementing a series of aggressive Marks and Spencer eCommerce growth strategies. Like a phoenix rising from the dust, Marks and Spencer eCommerce would soon become a model of how to scale online sales.

ECommerce managers can take away a lot from Marks and Spencer’s eCommerce bumpy road to (finally) succeeding in online retail.

In this post, we will go over a plethora of lessons on retail, website usability, and design. We will also explore how revamping the Marks and Spencer eCommerce strategy gave the company a second chance.

It all started in 1884, in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. This is where the fate of two men collided: Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer. 

Michael Marks, a Polish-British businessman and entrepreneur, bought goods from Dewhirst and sold them in nearby villages. As his business grew, Marks became known for one of the stalls he established in Leeds that offered every product in it for a penny. There, he placed a poster next to the stall saying, “Don’t Ask the Price, It’s a Penny”

Meanwhile, Thomas Spencer was an aspiring British businessman who was a cashier at I.J Dewhirst’s wholesale company. 

Marks originally asked I.J Dewhirst to go into business with him to open a store, to which Dewhirst declined and recommended Marks ask his cashier, Thomas Spencer. Spencer thought over Marks’ proposal and decided that investing £300 for half the share of the business was worth the gamble. Thus, the first Marks and Spencer store was born.

The store they opened in 1884 started off selling high-quality clothing and home products. In the last decade, food has also been added to the Marks and Spencer inventory. 

Nowadays, there are 950+ Marks and Spencer stores across the UK alone. You will find the British multinational retailer headquartered in Westminster, London. The retail chain is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

How the Marks & Spencer empire almost collapsed

Although Marks & Spencer’s profits peaked in the late 1990s, by the 2000s the company was in crisis. Several factors contributed to the decline of its profits.

First, the company’s supply chain strategy was in need of an overhaul. Marks & Spencer won the hearts of Brits by using local suppliers. However, as the UK suppliers’ costs continued to rise, the company’s profit margin suffered while the competition turned to importing from low-cost countries.

By the time the business decided to start importing, the switch came too late.

The holdout had been for nothing. Marks and Spencer would lose a core part of its appeal to the British public, and it already had paid the high price of staying with British suppliers too long.

Another factor that contributed to the decline of the brand is that Marks and Spencer was late to the game of accepting different forms of payment. Up until 2001, the company refused to accept any other credit card besides its own Chargecard.

Soon after, the brand started closing unprofitable stores. As recently as May 2018, Marks and Spencer confirmed that over 100 stores will close by 2022. 

The path to international expansion

The Marks & Spencer company values incorporate a policy dating back to the early 20th century of only selling British-made goods creating loyal customers. However, the brand recognized the need to grow domestically as well as internationally.

For this reason, in 1960, Marks and Spencer opened its first Asian store in Kabul, Afghanistan, followed by multiple cities in Europe. The international growth lasted through the 1980s.

While the stores in Paris remained profitable, many other international cities were not a complete success story. A total of eighteen non-profitable shops in Europe were sold in 2001. In Canada, the brand was viewed as a stodgy retailer catering to seniors and expatriate Brits. Efforts to modernize the brand came too late, and store closures soon followed.

In China, after Marks and Spencer once again failed to win over the local consumers, it hired Maria Roday, a former alumnus of Inditex with a reputation for nailing the latest consumer trends, as the new general manager for the Chinese market.

Marks and Spencer learned a valuable lesson from their international expansion: When expanding your brand, adapt your marketing strategies to appeal to local consumers.

The Marks and Spencer eCommerce Strategy for scaling growth

By 2009, pressures from profits and sales loss led Marks & Spencer to initiate a restructuring plan.

They took measures such as closures of low-profit stores to cut costs, along with discontinuing several of the brand’s low-profit lines. CEO Marc Bolland rolled out a new strategy aimed to strengthen brand image and increase profits. The brand would modernize its physical stores and focus on revamping its eCommerce platform.

Facing challenges with changes

If there is one thing Marks & Spencer took away from their international expansion failures, it is that you must appeal to your local consumers’ preferences . Bolland called for major change starting with the rollout of a new design for physical stores in May 2011 that would be based on demographics such as affluence and age of the stores’ locations. 

In response to shopper surveys on the difficulty of in-store navigation,  Bolland implemented a new store “navigation scheme”. Easier shopping means happier customers. Happier customers spend more money. The brand’s clothing division had an 11% market share in the UK by 2013. In 2018, following the retail innovation trends, M&S tested in its Amsterdam store a real-life clothing rail which was a success because it added an online feature to an in-store experience. Providing a seamless user experience, both online and in-store has now become a top priority for M&S.

Breaking ties with Amazon

Marks & Spencer’s eCommerce platform was also due for a major overhaul. Until 2011, online operations for Marks & Spencer were conducted solely via a partnership with Amazon. As the brand set a goal to revamp its image and increase multichannel sales by 2014, it also took the initiative to build and manage its own eCommerce platform. 

Their newly redesigned website cost around £150m , however, despite such a costly price tag, it proved to be a disaster. For all of the attention to detail in making the shoppers’ journey seamless and hassle-free in brick-and-mortar stores, the brand totally neglected to apply the same strategy to its eCommerce platform.

An example is that Marks and Spencer forced existing customers to re-register on the new site. This major misstep confused and annoyed customers. Also, simple changes such as replacing the ‘add to basket’ option with ‘Your bag’ left Marks and Spencer shoppers confused. Further impacting online conversions was the site’s non-clickable and malfunctioning path to checkout. 

If at first, you do not succeed, try, try again…

Marks and Spencer saw online sales drop 8% in the first quarter of 2014 following the re-launch of their website. At first, Bolland refused to acknowledge the shortcomings of the website and their impact on online conversions. He said that the new website is “a journey, not something customers recognize in a morning”.

However, by 2015, Bolland admitted the flawed eCommerce design, leading Marks and Spencers to make “ thousands of changes ” in the first year following its launch.

Following all of the tweaks and turnarounds, the brand’s ultimate eCommerce goal and strategy shifted. Marks and Spencer aimed to better understand its customers’ needs and deliver a more personalized shopping experience both online and in-store.

The result was Marks and Spencer developing an online platform that combines key capabilities of eCommerce, content management, search, and analytics to create a customized multichannel customer experience. 

It had some teething problems from the start. Yet, by acknowledging mistakes and learning from them, Marks and Spencer was able to grow and put the company on the path toward eCommerce success.

The Retail Tech Transformation

Marks and Spencer eCommerce continues to grow and set trends. In 2018, the brand became a digital-first chain, aiming to improve customer experience in their stores and to create the basis for more growth using commercial technology.

The Marks & Spencer plan to increase sales by more than £1bn by offering shoppers an  intelligent virtual assistant . To achieve that, the brand expects to invest £25m to implement this new technology. 

An intelligent virtual assistant offers online customers a personal shopping assistant that uniquely interacts with them throughout their online shopping journey.

Marks &^ Spencer is the first retailer to offer this feature. Since its launch in March 2018, over a quarter of a million customers have reaped the benefits of a customer-centric and smooth shopping journey on Marks and Spencer eCommerce platform.

Marks & Spencer: Plan A  

Another way that Marks & Spencer is ramping up their brand’s image is with Plan A. Launched in 2007, this eco and ethical program focuses on sustainable retail challenges. 

By using business practices such as being the world’s first and only carbon-neutral major retailer, Marks and Spencer wins the hearts of its customers. 

The company also holds its suppliers to the same expectations: meeting high quality, safety, environmental and social standards. Furthermore, it signed off on a business-wide Human Rights Policy in 2016 and became a signatory of the UN Global Compact.

As Marks and Spencer continues to expand internationally, Plan A has helped the brand redeem its image with local suppliers and shoppers alike by communicating its commitment to consciously sourced products and fair trade.

Lesson #1: Better late than never

Similarly to Zara, Marks and Spencer is a great example of this. They successfully “migrated” or embedded their logistics strategy and Supplier Management to their success online. It’s important to realize your core competitive advantage early on, invest in them, and leverage them across all sales channels.

Lesson #2: Stick to your core mission

Similar to  Zara , Marks and Spencer is a great example of this. They successfully “migrated” or embedded their logistics strategy and Supplier Management to their success online. It’s important to realize your core competitive advantage early on, invest on them, and leverage them across all sales channels.

Lesson #3: Build on your offline competitive advantage

Marks & Spencer business stats you should know

• There are a total of 1,463 M&S stores worldwide
• M&S currently has 979 stores across the U.K. including 615 that only sell food products
• Estimated M&S profits for 2019 are approximately £10.4 billion , of which 89% came from the British market
• Marks and Spencer food is its biggest selling category. Sales reached £6 billion in 2018
• Marks and Spencer eCommerce revenue hit £ 836 million for 2016/17
• M&S brands include Limited collection, Per Una, North Coast, Portfolio, Indigo Collection, Autograph, Marks and Spencer, Classic Collection, and more

Breaking news about Marks & Spencer

• November 2020 – M&S posts first loss in 94 years – Read more here
• May 2020 – Marks & Spencer reopens 49 branches in UK – full list of stores now open – Read more here
• May 2020 – Marks and Spencer extends 30-minute home delivery service – Read more here
• April 2020 – M&S shopping rules: Retailer clarifies lockdown changes to stores and refund policy – Read more here

Discover more resources about FMCG retailer s

• Sainsbury’s Marketing Strategy: Becoming the Second-Largest Supermarket Chain in the UK
• ASDA’s marketing strategy: How the British supermarket chain reached the top
• Tesco Case Study: How an Online Grocery Goliath Was Born
• The Ocado marketing strategy: How it reached the UK TOP50 retailers list
• ALDI’s marketing strategy: The key growth ingredients of the FMCG titan
• Walmart Marketing Strategy: Decoding the Success of the US Multinational Retailer
• Analyzing Lidl’s Marketing Strategy: How the Discount Supermarket Leader Scaled
• FMCG Marketing Strategies to Increase YOY Revenue

Resources about other renowned fashion retailers

• How ZARA Dominates the Ecommerce Fashion Industry
• Why ASOS is the Absolute UK Ecommerce Success Story
• New Look: The Marketing Strategy Behind the UK Fast-Fashion Retailer
• Farfetch Case Study: Analyzing The Strategy of the UK Fashion Unicorn
• SUPERDRY case study: The marketing strategy behind one of the top UK clothing retailers

The Marks & Spencer eCommerce case study has many layers. All the layers demonstrate various tactics every eCommerce retailer can “borrow” to replicate its success and growth rates. 

Let your takeaway from this post be the core lesson learned from Marks and Spencer: It’s never too late to join and conquer the online market. Know that, in eCommerce, there really is no such thing as “too late” as long as you are willing to grow from your mistakes and move forward.

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Marks & Spencer's aspiration to become omnichannel

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Martin Koehring is senior manager for sustainability, climate change and natural resources at Economist Impact (part of The Economist Group). He leads Economist Impact's sustainability-related policy and thought leadership projects in the EMEA region. He is also the head of the World Ocean Initiative , inspiring bold thinking, new partnerships and the most effective action to build a sustainable ocean economy.

He is a member of the Advisory Committee for the UN Environment Programme’s Global Environment Outlook for Business and is a faculty member in the Food & Sustainability Certificate Program provided by the European Institute for Innovation and Sustainability.

His previous roles at The Economist Group, where he has been since 2011, include managing editor, global health lead and Europe editor at The Economist Intelligence Unit.

He earned a bachelor of economic and social studies in international relations from Aberystwyth University and a master’s degree in diplomacy and international relations from the College of Europe.

Go back to 2009, and Marks & Spencer (M&S) looked to be in some trouble as it announced the appointment of a new boss, Marc Bolland. The 150-year-old British retailer was still the biggest clothes seller in the country, and its (relatively upmarket) food sales were healthy. But the problems were mounting, reflected in a slide in general merchandise (including fashion) sales, and indeed in the company’s reputation for value and quality.

Mr Bolland responded with a three-year plan, including a major investment into becoming an omnichannel retailer. Results still look shaky—in the three months to June 2014 clothing sales fell by 0.6%, with online sales down by 8.1% following a lightly marketed relaunch of the company’s website. But the future looks much brighter, with a drive into omnichannel promising not just an increase in online sales but also a much broader, more modern, in-store experience.

In many ways the core problem was one of identity: in fashion, M&S was unsure whether it was competing against new arrivals such as Primark, appealing to a young, price-sensitive audience, or against the more upmarket John Lewis department store, appealing to richer, older folk. The search for younger, trendier buyers on top of the traditional older clientele fed a plethora of sub-brands, which simply confused shoppers. The quality of both merchandise and stores was mixed, with some heavy discounting to appeal to the youngsters. The product range and supply chain were both too complex. And the website was outsourced to Amazon, based on an old platform ill-suited to modern retailing.

Mr Bolland has spent heavily on sorting out the problems, refreshing the product range and the stores to reinvent M&S as a mid-priced competitor to John Lewis—accepting that the average age of M&S customers is around 50. As part of this the company has spent some £150m launching its own website and moving towards omnichannel. On the company’s own figures, only 6.7m of its 34m annual customers shop with M&S both in-store and online. Some 8.3m shop only in-store. And, rather remarkably, some 19m—56% of the total—only shop in-store with M&S, but shop with competitors online. #_ftn1 " name="_ftnref1" title="case study 3 1 marks & spencer">[1] If M&S can make its huge customer base shop online as well as in-store—and join things up to make it easier to buy items spotted in a shop over the website—then sales could surge.

To gear up for the launch of its own website, M&S recruited technical and online experts. “This gave us internal development capacity,” says Amanda Glover, senior corporate PR manager at M&S, adding that it is now easier to update, extend and upgrade the new platform. M&S also appointed a single person to take charge of omnichannel retailing. The website went live at the start of 2014, after having learnt some lessons from online specialists such as eBay, including the use of newsletters and collections to grab customers’ attention and loyalty. Initially, the results were disappointing, with online trading falling after a slightly clumsy relaunch. The new website was only lightly marketed, and existing customers had to re-register on the new site, causing confusion and a short-term fall in usage.

Nonetheless, the new website works well enough; it can be easily updated and developed and is central to M&S becoming more convincingly multichannel as it gears up for a genuinely omnichannel future. Distribution has been rethought, with e-commerce orders (including "click and collect") from a single giant warehouse as part of a wider rationalisation of the company’s fragmented distribution chain. And some flagship stores are embracing multichannel, with assistants wielding tablet computers so that they can use the website to offer in-store customers a wider product choice and kiosks to allow people to self-serve online.

This development has not turned M&S into a state-of-the-art omnichannel retailer yet—there is no sign of beacon technology to guide people around purchases and the store, for example, and many of the smaller stores use only parts of the new approach for lack of space. But enough has been done to forge a multichannel future for M&S, including the use of online technology to increase international sales in markets (for example, some of the smaller EU countries) where it lacks a store presence.

#_ftnref1 " name="_ftn1" title="case study 3 1 marks & spencer">[1] "Marks & Spencer launches online drive", The Telegraph , May 1st 2014. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/10802873/Marks-and-Spencer-launches-online-drive.html

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2010: Marks & Spencer, Sustaining the Brand Promise - Case Study

The determination of Marks & Spencer to hold fast to its message of quality through both the good and bad times reinforced the brand’s premium positioning and its profitability.

Key insights

• Despite the recession Marks & Spencer (M&S) held its nerve by maintaining its premium pricing and continuing to invest in brand-building advertising.
• Refusing to lower prices meant the retailer didn’t suffer the fate of companies which cut pricing in the bad times and then struggled to raise them again.
• Outstanding communications, including iconic advertising, were an important part of its strategy.

M&S is one of the UK’s leading retailers, selling clothing, food and homeware. In what have been troubled times for the UK high street, the retailer took what appeared to many in the media to be two foolhardy decisions. First, it was determined to maintain its price premium when competitors were slashing their prices to the bone to survive. Secondly, it decided to continue to invest in brand-building advertising to justify that premium.

Even though newspapers were full of stories of falling sales and declining share prices and consumer confidence plummeted, measures of M&S’s ‘brand momentum’ remained consistently positive — despite premium pricing in a discounting world — and were shown to be directly influenced and maintained by advertising.

As 2009 progressed, so M&S’s sales performance and share price began steadily to improve. It was able to resist the margin-pinching ‘race to the bottom’ in which many of its competitors were engaged and which they would find very hard to reverse once the recovery set in. By the last quarter of 2009, M&S had achieved its strongest performance for two years, with shares outperforming the DJ Stoxx European Retail Index by 46%.

The good times, the bad times

In the years prior to the recession, when M&S was faced with a takeover bid by Sir Philip Green, it invested heavily and consistently in advertising that was universally acknowledged to have increased footfall, sold products and benefited the brand by raising measured scores on such dimensions as ‘quality’, ‘trust’, ‘understanding’ and ‘worth paying more for’. This, in turn, boosted the share price.

As the dark clouds of recession loomed, things got tough on the high street. It was, without doubt, the worst recession in living memory. As a consequence, consumer confidence plummeted by an unprecedented forty percentage points. Some of the biggest names in retail crashed out of business. Only four or five years ago, for example, it would have been hard to imagine the high street without Woolworths. But it happened.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, more or less the whole of the industry went into a discounting frenzy. And Britain’s biggest retailer, Tesco, became Britain’s biggest discounter. But every cloud has a silver lining:the Primarks of this world, whose business models were built around absolute bargain-basement prices, did very nicely for themselves. But everyone else was hurting.

Standing firm

One retailer that did not cut its prices as deeply as the rest, and that did not abandon its commitment to brand-building, was M&S. This was despite the fact that keeping a steady nerve when all around were panicking was hard and, at times, painful. In consequence, stories abounded about the ‘troubles’ and ‘difficulties’ suffered by the brand. In January 2008, when £5 billion was wiped off of the share 2prices of high street stores, the media were quick to pin the blame on M&S, which had just reported a 2.2% fall in sales.

“Credit crunch wipes a third off of M&S profits” said one headline. Troubled High Street Giant M&S to cut jobs” said another; “M&S sales likely to fall again,” said yet another. The negative press coverage was creating a vicious circle. But M&S still did not rush to join the price-cutters. Chairman Sir Stuart Rose announced that he was confident that a strong brand left M&S “well positioned to compete by improving our operational delivery and continuing to focus on quality, value and choice. ”And communications were central to the job of turning the vicious circle around.

In February 2009, Marketing Week published the results of a survey, carried out by Brandhouse/The Centre for Brand Analysis in 2008 at the nadir of the recession, into the emotional appeal of a hundred of Britain’s leading brands as judged by consumers. The only retailer to feature in the Top 10 was M&S, which came seventh. This is despite the fact that M&S’s prices consistently indexed at +8, versus Tesco’s -11 and Asda’s -22.

Meanwhile, in sharp contrast to this precipitous drop in consumer confidence overall, attitudes to M&S as measured in terms of brand momentum were far less volatile, and never strayed into negative figures, not even at the very worst of times.

Consumers, it seemed, continued to feel good about the M&S brand despite the best efforts of the media doom-mongers and the appeal of price-slashing rival retailers. Gradually, the drop in M&S’s sales and profits began to slow down, so that by April 2009 the year-on-year drop for the quarter was just 4.2%. Investors who, acting on the strength of media reports, had been expecting a continued downward spiral, were taken by surprise. The result was that the share price jumped by 12% overnight.

One of the strongest influencing factors driving this strong brand momentum was consistent advertising. Even throughout the worst of the recession, M&S advertising explicitly focused on building the brand’s quality perception, rather than ‘selling off the family silver’ for short-term gain by just plugging the latest low prices.

Consistency of communications

The overarching communications strategy was based around the idea that M&S provides ‘quality worth paying more for’: you pay a bit more but get a lot more back. This brand campaign ran across all parts of the business celebrating the brand’s long-term commitment to quality. The activity also coincided with M&S’s 125th anniversary. This enabled it to assert its stability and heritage in a time when big names were disappearing from the high street. The retailer was able to show how the brand had been there for people through the decades. The TV spot told stories that illustrated the lengths M&S has gone to bring the best quality products to the high street for the past 125 years.(Figures 1 through 10 show some of the TV stills from the M&S 125 years campaign. Figures 11 through 17 show a selection of outdoor ads from the M&S 125 years campaign).

The TV campaign was supported by national poster and press to provide a sense of scale and stature and featured ‘hero’ products such as Oakham chicken, the iconic chocolate pudding, lingerie and tailoring.

The brand idea also ran across the Plan A activity to show how committed the retailer was to becoming more sustainable and which helped to reinforce M&S’s quality credentials (see Chapter 11). Stories included Fairtrade cotton, sustainable fishing suppliers and traceable meat (Figures 18 and 19).

The quality message was also reinforced in promotional activity: namely ‘Dine in for £10’. This reframed the competitive positioning strategy to challenge restaurants directly because compared with a meal out, £10 for three courses plus wine represented fantastic value for money. Despite being a promotional mechanic, this actually raised quality perceptions and positioned the food as worth paying more for, not only among core customers but crucially among occasional food customers too, helping drive footfall and basket size.

Finally, even the M&S Christmas campaign reflected the changing mood of the UK consumer. Rather than celebrate with the opulence of previous years, it focused on the integral role M&S has played in the nation’s Christmas for so many years

Taking the long view

For a premium-priced high street brand to ride out of such a deep recession so well and to be in the position it is now in is a remarkable thing. But the longer-term achievements of consistent, long-term brand-building in both good times and bad are even more important. Econometric modelling has shown that the long-term payback of consistent brand investment are, on average, four times greater than the short-term profit boost generated by cutting it.

In contrast to many of its rivals, M&S continued to build its brand equity, continued to maintain its price premium and to justify it through advertising, and refused to damage its reputation for quality in pursuit of short-term gain, even when its profits and share price were falling. Nor did it educate or condition its shoppers to trade down to ‘bargain basement’ goods where once they would have been prepared to pay a bit more for quality.

It took time for this strategy to begin to pay off, and it took nerve. But, by the start of the last quarter of 2009, it began to pay off, with the Wall Street Journal, on 30th September, reporting how, after being “hit hard in the recession, losing ground to cheaper rivals like Primark in clothes and supermarkets in food”, M&S had begun to turn its fortunes around, announcing its best financial performance for two years.

The result was a gradual growth in share price over 2009. By the end of the year M&S was outperforming the DJ Stoxx European Retail Index by 46%.

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Home / Case Studies / Marks & Spencer

Marks & Spencer streamlines companywide communication with Microsoft PowerApps and SharePoint lists

Published on May 13, 2019

Marks and Spencer

Global retail giant, Marks & Spencer (M&S)  needed a modern application that would allow employees to stay engaged with customers and stay connected and informed about upcoming sales activities.

Using SharePoint lists, Microsoft Flow and PowerApps, the organization created an application that enables teams to track and distribute sales promotions and activities to store managers across their varying locations around the world.

Today, more than 800 store managers can open the application from Microsoft Teams, mobile devices or desktops to view all in-store activity within the year from anywhere.

Headquartered in the UK, Marks & Spencer is a unique retailer with more than 1,400 stores in 57 countries, serving 32 million customers in stores and online.

The competitive retail landscape and evolving shopping behaviors of customers means it is essential for M&S to have access to the most efficient and effective technology throughout its operations in order to offer customers the best experience.

From home goods to grocery items, M&S stores carry a broad array of products, spanning numerous departments, and requiring thoughtful, connected leadership from dozens of in-store managers. To ensure store-wide awareness, store managers relied on word-of-mouth and printed hand-outs to inform their employees about upcoming activities. Relying on these traditional means of communication often required managers to expend excessive time tied to their desktop or sifting through papers.

Knowing that their process was antiquated and a barrier to productive store management, Duane Bergh, the Product Owner for Workplace Productivity, began investigating other options that could streamline communication of store activity. “We needed a process where store managers could have a simpler process of what activity is going on in the store.”

Since M&S was already an Office 365 customer, Duane and his team initially created a SharePoint hosted application, driven from a SharePoint list, that would allow managers to view in-store activity all in one place. While beautiful in appearance, the application took a significant amount of time to build and included numerous complexities.

Soon after launch, Duane and his team became curious about another product in the Office suite – Microsoft PowerApps. Feeling hopeful, the team began building a replica of their SharePoint-based “Activity App” with PowerApps. With only two developers and a week’s time of dedication, the team found success. “Building a solution in PowerApps was probably a fifth of the time that it took to build a custom dev solution.”

Using SharePoint lists and PowerApps, M&S now had a new application to track and distribute activity to store managers across their varying locations around the world. And even better – it could be accessed and run on mobile devices, enabling managers to read and share information about upcoming deals regardless of where they stood in their store. With functions such as a filter to look for specific activities and announcements across product lines, it didn’t take long for the M&S business team to see the value in the new Activity Tracker and launch it across the company.

Building a solution in PowerApps was probably a fifth of the time that it took to build a custom dev solution.

Today, with the new activity planner application, more than 800 store managers can open the application from their mobile device or desktop and view all in-store activity within the year. They can communicate more easily with various departments and employees, as well as customers, about upcoming activity and campaigns. The Activity Tracker also serves as a valuable tool in comparing sales numbers from one week, month, or year to the next. As a company focused on providing excellent customer experiences, M&S is giving its managers the ability to more easily focus their efforts on the customers in front of them. As Retail Business Development Manager Scott Townend says, having the Activity Tracker means “the time spent trying to get on a workstation is being reduced, and, therefore, they’re freeing up time to be facing our customers more on the shop floor, and, therefore, adding much more value to their roles.”

Giving managers access to in-store activity is just the start to a bright future in company collaboration at M&S. Hoping to integrate with other internal processes, the team looks forward to adding new functions, including the following:

• Microsoft Teams integration : M&S currently relies on Microsoft Teams for internal communication – whether that’s across managers or within specific stores. Being able to collaborate in real time, through file share, video conferencing, and chatting is important to the business. In the near future, the M&S team hopes to integrate Teams and their Activity Tracker so groups can reap the benefits of both, all from a single interface.
• Digital marketing: To allow sharing of store updates and photos of events, campaigns, and department set-ups, the team is working on an additional application that enables store managers to collaborate more deeply. They’re hoping to add functionality that would kick off targeted emails to customers about campaigns or events based on their interests.

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Product details

• Harvard Business School →
• Faculty & Research →
• January 2012 (Revised September 2015)
• HBS Case Collection

Tough Decisions at Marks and Spencer

• Format: Print
• | Language: English
• | Pages: 15

About The Author

George Serafeim

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THE MARKS & SPENCER STORY

Listening leadership, how marks & spencer puts ideas from it's 70,000 employees at the heart of improving the business, process improvement, employee experience, integrations, microsoft teams, to make marks & spencer a better place to work and shop, at a glance.

Ideas Shared

'YES' IDEAS

The 'suggest to steve' story.

Introducing ‘Suggest to Steve’

Founded in 1884, Marks & Spencer is one of the world’s longest-running and most respected retailers. With 1,400 stores across 57 countries, M&S is renowned for its quality products, impeccable service and innovation.

M&S holds a special place in the heart of customers and employees alike and it’s those employees that Chief Executive, Steve Rowe, turned to in 2018 when suggestion scheme ‘Suggest to Steve’ was launched.

Suggest to Steve is a way for employees to share their ideas on where M&S can improve as a business, be it a product, a process, or a way of working. From the stores to support centre, every M&S employee is encouraged to share their ideas no matter how big or small.

The challenge was how to enable this level of strategic discussion on a scale that had never been seen before.

To transform our business, we need absolutely everyone to play a part. We have 70,000 passionate colleagues, and they know M&S better than anyone.

THE CHALLENGE

Engaging every single employee.

The reaction of colleagues to Suggest to Steve was immediate and inspiring. Two years into the programme and 20,000 ideas had been shared with 500 brought to life, making M&S a better place to work and shop.

In 2020, the team asked themselves ‘How can we make it even better?

v1 of Suggest to Steve required employees to send ideas via email. Some employees just didn’t regularly use email and so didn’t engage, whilst the process of managing ideas in an inbox was laborious and time-consuming,

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, Microsoft Teams had been rolled out to every single M&S employee. Was there a better way to reach employees on the tool that they now used every single day?

Microsoft Teams has become the home of work and collaboration at M&S. So, where better for our colleagues to share their Suggestions to Steve?

How M&S uses Microsoft Teams

The Solution - Teams App

2.0 on teams.

In 2021, Suggest to Steve was relaunched on Microsoft Teams, using ‘Ideas by Sideways 6’ a native app for Teams built in partnership with Microsoft.

The app makes it easier than ever before for employees everywhere at M&S to share their ideas, whenever and wherever inspiration strikes – be that on mobile, desktop and even M&S issued Honeywell devices.

But the move to Teams did more than just improve accessibility. In the past, employees couldn’t see what other employees were suggesting – leading to lots of duplicate ideas. Now they could search and see if someone had shared something similar, e.g., ’Percy Pig boxer shorts’.

The change also improved collaboration and transparency. M&S employees could now like and comment on other people’s ideas to support and improve them. And see where every idea was in the pipeline!

M&S and Suggest to Steve is one of the best examples in the world of Teams as an enabler of company wide collaboration and innovation.

The Solution - Sideways 6

Challenging the status quo.

The move to Teams immediately increased engagement. With 200 new ideas now coming in every week, and just two members of the Suggest to Steve team responsible for managing them, they needed a system to help.

That’s where Sideways 6’s back-end idea management platform came in.

Rather than email suggestions that lacked structure, M&S employees now had to give 5 key bits of information about each idea - Title, description, store, idea area, and benefit type. This halved the time it took to assess each idea and direct them to the right person in M&S to review.

The team made use of automated workflows and comms to streamline the process and finally had real-time analytics to see everything from which stores were most engaged to the types of ideas that were most common.

Sideways 6 and Microsoft Teams has taken Suggest to Steve to the next level. Engagement has never been higher and the whole process is now streamlined.

RESULTS & STORIES

It’s a ‘yes’ from steve.

Moving Suggest to Steve to Sideways 6 and Microsoft Teams has increased the volume of ideas by 70% year-on-year and the colleague experience of interacting with the scheme has improved exponentially. Employee engagement is higher than ever with over 3,000 ideas, likes, and comments being shared every single month.

But Suggest to Steve is about more than the numbers. It’s about the ideas and the people behind them. Those who get a ‘Yes’ from Steve.

Like Michaela, who suggested a new reusable bag to raise money for the NHS during Covid-19. The idea got a ‘Yes’ from Steve and raised over £150,000; Sarah and Simon, who suggested M&S produce a new set of more diverse and inclusive toy dolls for kids; And Lee, whose idea to handle parts of people compliance digitally has saved over 600 pieces of paper every single week. Just three examples of ‘Yeses’ from hundreds.

BONUS: If you enjoyed the case study, then you'll love our podcast with M&S CEO, Steve Rowe. Listen here »

I have not found such a warm, friendly and fun team in a supplier before. Working with Sideways 6 feels like a true partnership.

Podcast with Steve

Hear about it from the man himself.

Ideas are the lifeblood of any business.

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The Marks & Spencer Story

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Marks & Spencer Case Study

Marks & Spencer Sees Faster Delivery and Incremental Gains in Placement Leading to Higher Engagement and More Sales

In an effort to ensure their campaigns always reach customers’ inboxes, Marks & Spencer, one of the UK’s oldest and most loved retailers, works with Validity to increase inbox placement at major mailbox providers, to improve open and click rates, and reduce bounce rate by 86%.

Read how M&S significantly reduced filtering and throttling of its email marketing campaigns.

• The Movement
• Get Involved

Case Study: Marks & Spencer – A Commitment Approach to Engagement  

In 2012 we moved away from a transactional action planning approach in response to the employee survey results.

Instead, we introduced management teams making behaviourally based commitments in liaison with their people in response to their feedback, initiating a more transformational approach to engagement.

Managers are encouraged to think about and understand the culture they and their team set and lead in their store or business area. Managers then carry out listening groups to talk to their people about what will really make a difference.

Management Teams Make Commitments

Considering the results of the employee survey, the feedback from the listening groups and in conjunction with the employee representative group, management teams will make two to three commitments that will be more meaningful than lots of basic actions.

Commitments are long term sustainable changes in how it feels to work in that area and about people changing how they work and their behaviour.

Each business area is given a poster on which they write their commitments, this is then displayed on their noticeboard. This way the commitments are really visible to the team and become a really honest, transparent way of working rather than an action plan that is put away in a drawer.

The biggest challenge we faced was the concern from managers that the commitments were difficult to write, required some hard thinking about and can look less tangible than action plans. This was a very different way of working for Managers and many struggled with this new concept to begin with.

A Real Shift in Focus for the Business

This ‘ditching of the action plans’ was symbolic and for us represented a real shift in focus for the business and a mindset change for many line managers who had traditionally approached engagement merely as a task to be completed.

To overcome these challenges we set a communication plan to engage key stakeholders on the change and the support we needed from them to embed the commitments approach. We created supporting toolkits explaining what commitments were, best practice and some examples of what commitments could look like. The HR Business Partners were critical in coaching and educating managers and challenging their mindset. The most important aspect was explaining why we were changing the approach and the benefits of a transformational approach to engagement.

The success of the commitments relies on engaging the whole team and their buy in. Commitments should be regularly reviewed to really embed the change. Managers keep their teams updated with progress and any changes they are making to keep the commitments relevant and alive as they get new feedback and insight. The results of the pulse surveys also provides teams with a sense of their progress in driving their engagement efforts.

A Commitment Approach Makes a Real Difference

A commitment approach got our Management teams to work differently by focussing on behaviours and ways of working rather than engagement being seen as an activity/ task or action which needed doing in addition to the day job.

Commitments make a real difference to our people, they demonstrate that we are listening to their feedback and their views are important to us. Commitments can drive long term sustainable business change rather than a tick list of tasks to be completed.

Engagement is now our sole people KPI for our business and has equal weighting to sales. We have seen our engagement scores increase year on year for the last 6 years.

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I’ve not heard of the commitment approach however I’m intrigued. We are just embarking on yet another round of action planning following an employee engagement survey…. plans which I suspect will once again stay in the shared drive!

Can you share examples of some of the most effective commitments -and key principles to creating them?

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