Business Analysis of Mark&Spencer Company - Example

Business Analysis of Mark & Spencer Company by Student’s Name    Code+ Course Name Professor’s Name University Name City Date Business Analysis of Mark & Spencer Company In this report, the sales figures from North London is used to perform business analysis from three departments within nine M&S stores. Analysis of big data has many benefits to businesses. M&S Company as a retailer utilize big data to benefit from big data analysis to understand the current business trends, identify opportunities, and better forecast on the future for business informed decision making. The goal of performing this sales big data analysis is to uncover missed opportunities and missteps that assist in improving sales volumes and to establish the effectiveness of advertisement towards sales of M&S products. The current utilisation of big data has led to the discovery of actionable insights towards other enterprises. With the use of big data analytics platforms, M&S Retail Company is destined to increase efficiency, boost sales, manage risks and improve customer service. Moreover, the retail store could utilise the use of business analysis of big data to improve customer relations, identify loyalty, help with product development and establish the most relevant and effective advertisement opportunity for its products. Sales Analysis Report The best way to understand the M&S stores in North England is to see it in action. Sales report was collected from 9 stores within three departments to show sale performance in the first three months of the year 2015. The objective is to analyse the sales data and walk executives and business owners through the results to equip them with the decision-making guidelines for the retail company. Data Validity Validity concerns the generalizability of the findings from a sample to additional populations and other environmental conditions. To achieve validity, variation in the conditions and types of data and data handling should lead to the same results. The raw data set from M&S Company provided for analysis was clean, well-organised for analysis. Having a clean and organised data before commencing analysis is necessary to eliminate generating wrong results that could lead to wrong conclusions. The basics of the validity of data thus rely on the necessity of data management. An accurate conclusion can be made that the data collection tool used and database was valid and reliable, which is demonstrated with no missing data, no spelling errors, same date formats and consistency in coding (Yes and No). With this in mind, the overall validly of the results can be used to draw insightful results for decision making. The three departments (food, home wear, and clothing & footwear) performed differently within the nine store in North London. Figure 1 below indicates that the food department was the best performing department across the nine stores while the home wear experienced the lowest sales within the first quarter of 2015. Figure 1: Mean sales of M&S stores from North London. Figure 1 also demonstrate that while Darlington had the least sales from the food department, a positive trend was observed from clothing and footwear department compared to all other eight M&S company in North London. Manchester had the best performing food department with the highest mean of 209947.84 sales over the period of 3 months while Lancaster had the lowest performing food department. In the homeware department, Newcastle store had the highest mean sales of 26, 491.55 sales volume in first three months of 2015, with the lowest performing wear home department being in Lancaster stores. The clothing and footwear is a department that was established to supply consumers with textile products ranging from all body wear and foot wears. In M&S Retail Company, the best store had 70,144.33 mean sales within the first quarter of 2015 being in Darlington stores in contract to York stores that had the lowest sales of clothes and footwear among the nine stores in North England. With the above results and illustrations in the table below, it is can be assumed on departmental performance that Lancaster stores were the least performing in the North London Mark & Spencer retail. Table 1: Means of sales Store Food Home wear Clothing and footwear Manchester 209947.84 15239.07 27638.46 Stockport 27458.13 8845.79 7554.90 Darlington 23554.14 7147.44 70144.31 Middlesbrough 28920.46 8265.96 11400.33 Lancaster 21997.78 4567.17 8971.93 Newcastle 41465.75 26491.55 13763.94 Harrogate 35841.18 7549.48 11863.58 Leeds 61949.65 12163.75 37056.33 York 42384.53 9663.17 30943.81 The food department was observed to be the best performing department among the nine stores. As illustrated in figure 1, the visualised analysis results of the sales data reveal that in almost all the stores except in Darlington, the food department dominated the home wear and clothing & footwear departments. Advertisement Effect on Sales Figure 2 illustrated the sales performance results of advertisement against the lack of advertisement. The clear visualised results give an indication that whereas the advertising had a positive impact on the sales volume, the impact was partially significant. The bar for advertisement in comparison to no advertisement has a small difference. In the analysis of Stockport sales data from the food department, the bar graph is almost equal, which means that with or without advertisement, the food department in Stockport will record almost equal sales. Figure 2: Advertisement contribution on sales of M&S products Conclusions The sales report thus conclude, that the advertisement of all the departments in M&S retail are not effective towards the full realisation of sales. Thus, it recommends to M&S executives to do a background check and establish more effective advertisement platforms. The observation in figure 2 also displays that Leeds stores food department did not utilize advertisement platform. However, the store recorded a good sales volume compared to all other eight stores except for Manchester only. The dismal performance of Lancaster stores could be attributed to inadequate advertising that resulted in low consumer awareness of both food and home wear products in the region. The sales report, therefore, recommend a rigorous advertising of from the two departments using various advertising platform to aim at the target consumers. Recommendations from the Sales Analysis The first quarter sales report thus concluded that, in contrast to the positive realisation of sales volumes across the retail stores, the retail company need to take the advantage of the market to fully optimise their sales. A few recommendation were made from the analysis as follows:- i. The company should analyse the market to identify their customer base. Identification of the customer base will ensure that each retail store develops a good strategic marketing approach including relevant and effective advertisements. ii. The products from the retail company should also take into account the multi-cultural diversity of their market area. This is fundamental give the dynamics of the different market within the North England. Read More