Does Mark and Spencer Have a Future?
DOES MARK AND SPENCER HAVE A FUTURE?
In the second of our series of articles on leading British companies, we look at the recent woes of the country’s most famous retailer
The country’s most famous retailer MARKS & SPENCER’S big store in London’s Kensington High Street has just had a re-fit. Instead of the usual drab M&S interior, it is now Californian shopping mall meets modernist chrome and creamy marble floors. Roomy walkways and designer displays have replaced dreary row after row of clothes racks. By the end of the year M&S will have 26 such stores around Britain—the first visible sign that the company is making a serious effort to pull out of the nose-dive it has been in for the past two years.
Things have become so bad that M&S, until recently a national icon, is in danger of becoming a national joke. It does not help that its advertisements featuring plump naked women on mountains—the first-ever TV ads the company has produced—have met with an embarrassed titter; nor that, last week, the BBC’s Watchdog programme savaged M&S for overcharging and poor quality in its range of garments for the fuller figure.
As the attacks grow in intensity, so do the doubts about M&S’s ability to protect its core value: a reputation for better quality that justified a slight price premium—at least in basic items, such as underwear. It is a long time since any self-respecting teenager went willingly into an M&S store to buy clothes. Now even parents have learned to say no. Shoppers in their thirties and forties used to dress like their parents. Now many of them want to dress like their kids.
M&S’s makeover comes not a moment too soon. Compared with the jazzy store layouts of rivals such as Gap or Hennes & Mauritz, M&S shops look like a hangover from a bygone era. The makeover aims to bring it into the present.
Add to this in-bred top management. People tended to join M&S straight from college and work their way slowly up the ranks. Few senior appointments were made from
In the second of our series of articles on leading British companies, we look at the recent woes of the country’s most famous retailer
The country’s most famous retailer MARKS & SPENCER’S big store in London’s Kensington High Street has just had a re-fit. Instead of the usual drab M&S interior, it is now Californian shopping mall meets modernist chrome and creamy marble floors. Roomy walkways and designer displays have replaced dreary row after row of clothes racks. By the end of the year M&S will have 26 such stores around Britain—the first visible sign that the company is making a serious effort to pull out of the nose-dive it has been in for the past two years.
Things have become so bad that M&S, until recently a national icon, is in danger of becoming a national joke. It does not help that its advertisements featuring plump naked women on mountains—the first-ever TV ads the company has produced—have met with an embarrassed titter; nor that, last week, the BBC’s Watchdog programme savaged M&S for overcharging and poor quality in its range of garments for the fuller figure.
As the attacks grow in intensity, so do the doubts about M&S’s ability to protect its core value: a reputation for better quality that justified a slight price premium—at least in basic items, such as underwear. It is a long time since any self-respecting teenager went willingly into an M&S store to buy clothes. Now even parents have learned to say no. Shoppers in their thirties and forties used to dress like their parents. Now many of them want to dress like their kids.
M&S’s makeover comes not a moment too soon. Compared with the jazzy store layouts of rivals such as Gap or Hennes & Mauritz, M&S shops look like a hangover from a bygone era. The makeover aims to bring it into the present.
Add to this in-bred top management. People tended to join M&S straight from college and work their way slowly up the ranks. Few senior appointments were made from