Marks and Spencer as One of the Biggest Retail Companies - Essay Example

Marks and Spencer as One of the Biggest Retail Companies Introduction Headquartered at London, Marks and Spencer is one of the biggest retail companies in UK having its spread all over the world. Its product ranges are from flowers and gift vouchers to clothing, from lunchtogo to technology, from food and beverages to services. At the end of 28th March 2009, total assets of the company went up to £ million 7,258.1 from £ million 7,161.0 as on 29th March 2008. (M&S, 2009). This was not the case six years back. The analysts have described the turn around and return of the company to its health is an example of recovery led by advertising. The problem In April 2004, the prospect of the company seemed blurred. The brand of the Marks and Spencer got a great push back and lost its confidence due the consecutive decline in sales and continual negative PR. The company has started to lose public faith and love and the fear of taken over by Philip Green of Arcadia Group were on the threshold. Rejecting the offer of Mr. Green, Mr. Stuart Rose has restructured the company through promoting its brand and has formulated a method of treatment, which worked in a significant way for the M & S to get back its health. (Thompson, Neal, Threadgould and Trillo, June 30, 2006: 3-4) There were different thoughts on the vulnerability of the company. Analysts told that decline of sales of the company in a continuous basis and lack of enthusiasm for change were mainly responsible behind such weakness whereas the journalist reported that the company listed itself in one of the worst performer among the 100 companies. Beside the customers were also not satisfied with the product of the company. The garments of the company were believed to be old fashioned. People thought the company might have fallen in the vicious circle of loss. Fall in sales of the M & S in one way led to fall in share price and in another way led to negative captions producing negative impression in the market. These movements caused to loss of confidence over the company by the customers for purchase and also by the investors to invest. In this situation when Mr. Green came with his proposal to acquire M & S, the senior team of the company including the new Chief Executive of the company, Mr. Stuart Rose and the Executive Director for Marketing, Store design and Development, Mr. Steven Sharp has formed a new plan regarding the business of the company and successfully crush the proposal of Mr. Green. Solution sought through advertising and communication Application of the transmission model of communication According to transmission model as explained by McQuail (2005), a message is first selected from a source and then the message is transmitted through a communication channel to a receiver. The receiver then transforms the signal again into message to send it to the destination. It is like a one directional flow with a cause-effect association evident in the process. This model of communication tends to answer the question – “Who says what to whom, through what channel and to what effect?” (McQuail, 2005:70). The management of the company has gradually started to regain the customers’ confidence by insisting them to believe that they also were the owners of the company as they upheld M & S in a unique position along with the shareholders of the company. Such a public sentiment has been greatly used by the company to reshape it and produced the logo ‘Yours M & S’ as the new name of the company for its market and advertise campaign. According to Mr. Rose, “We are going to give M & S back its customers” (Thompson, Neal, Threadgould and Trillo, June 30, 2006: 8). Therefore the name “Yours M&S” carries the message of giving back the customer their very own company. The effect it wants to generate it to gain back the old customers and enhance the brand reputation. In the early case when the advertisement of the company did not worked according to the expectation, Mr. Rose approached for engineering the prospective turn around for the company by making such advertising and promoting strategies that would be helpful to regain the customer support. In this case, when it was perceived that the brand of the company was at the bottom, a new innovative marketing communication strategy was needed. This requirement clearly paved the path for introducing the new brand image of the company through the name “Yours M & S” for the new marketing campaigning program. This idea has got new impetus in the light of rejection of the proposal by Mr. Green. The requirement for a new innovative communication has been felt by the company which forced the management team of the company and Mr. Stuart Rose to approach to both the public investors and the institutional investors. They also required convincing the public and customers of the company by making them believe that M & S is not only the company of the investors or the staffs, it is their company and the company needs their support to return to its prosperous life. This idea was clearly shaped for both retaining the existing customers and also attracting the new customers towards the diverse products of the company and with the support of the customer getting back the value, service and obviously the quality standard of the company. The signal here is the message that the company is returned to its customers. The messenger through which the transmission takes place is the new name itself. Thus transmission model delivers the message, which the company wants to deliver to its customers. Application of ritual model of communication Expressive or ritual model of communication is the way of using shared emotions and experience through advertising and promotional campaigns. A symbol is used to convey the message. (McQuail, 2005:71) In this recovery program Mr. Stuart Rose kept the women’s wear at the center of the strategy. He told, “ I believe women’s wear is the key to the whole brand”. (Thompson, Neal, Threadgould and Trillo, June 30, 2006: 8). Keeping in focus the women’s wear as the main instrument for the campaign, Twiggy was selected as a reasonable symbol of style of women’s wear. Such a symbol has been generated to experience an amazing comeback by the M & S management team. It was also a comeback for Twiggy who was in her mid fifties and making a come back in modeling. There was a symbolic meaning where the company was also undergoing same experience by trying to make a comeback. This could be read as a welcoming return of an old brand, which was just about to fade away. The management team thought that they should not underestimate the store level changes as cloths have become very stylish and with the increasing competition the opening price of clothing has been decreased. Besides, the overall service has improved tremendously and stores have started to become more renovated and revamped. The management team felt that without making such adjustment they could not expect the success of communication. They understood that the communication was required to build up the confidence along with its promise to change for serving its declaration to public. Communication became too critical to M & S for changing the outlook of the people towards the product of the company through turning out the wave of negative PR into positive one. Such an improvement for campaigning was felt significantly, especially in respect of the food products and women’s wear as 50% of the company’s turnover has been contributed by the food items and women’s wear plays dominant role to drive the overall brand of the company. The idea was that if the media promotion activities work accordingly it definitely would increase the sales of the products leading to rise in share price and create positive caption. This will produce positive intuitions about the company in the market and help to increase the confidence of the consumers to purchase the product of M & S and also the confidence of the investors to invest in the company. Increasing the demand for the products all such movements lead to increase of sales by turning out the vicious circle into the virtuous one. The motive was to use the ritual or symbolic communication along with other modes for restructuring the M & S by segmenting and meeting the target audience. Through media promotion the current shoppers were targeted for making them feel better by purchasing the products of the M & S and for using their voices as the tools for brand promotion. Applying the reception model of communication The reception model of communication may be interpreted as locating the “attribution and construction of meaning (derived from the media) with the receiver.” (McQuail, 2005: 73) It takes into account the power of the audience especially in interpreting the message sent by the company. The audience at times fail tog rasp what the media or the source tries to suggest. They might interpret the message in their own ways. It is important therefore to focus on strategies, which can help the organization, gain some faith from the audience of its advertisements and campaigns. The communication toward the former shoppers was emphasized for getting another chance from them by influencing them to create sufficient fashion trustworthiness on the products of the M & S. The journalists were targeted to earn their faith so that they recommend the brand of M & S to their readers by convincing them that the promise the company made has actually been made real. Finally through media and communication the city analysts were shown that by investing in marketing campaign it was possible to sustain the achievement in growth of sales. The customers, journalists and analysts are all taken as the recipients of the communication arranged by the company. Through all these targeted media promotion activities the endorsement of “Yours M & S” the M & S got back its customers. Such media communication activities have influenced the public to acknowledge the ownership of M & S directly. Such communication was made possible to apply all audiences, from customers to journalists, from shareholders to analysts. The promotion of “Your M & S” was aimed to amalgamate all the product specific campaigns by focusing mainly on food and women’s wear of the M & S. Since the role of communication was aimed to return confidence of the public towards M & S, the choices of media for the promotional purpose was also taken in a very confident strategic way. The strategy was to identify the media style and bring together investment at the back of the brand escorted approach in public media. In promoting the brand of the M & S, creation of greater visibility of its products was also needed. In its communication back-up approach, three principles of confident Media promotional strategies had been taken by M & S. First M & S focused to launch the “Your M & S” logo in a very large format by maintaining an elevated quality for outdoor campaigning. Second the company kept its authority by maintaining its supreme sense of balance for advertising its food items. For strengthening the finest position of the company and for conveying a prolonged quality message to the public the investment of M & S went almost fashionably towards TV. Third the company regained its energy in promoting women’s wear. It got high confidence to demonstrate such products through TV by the support of outdoor as well as national press. All these fell in place because the reception model was used positively in communicating the desired information to the audience. Let us now see the chronology of this high profile campaign of M & S. In August 2004, “Yours M & S” were first disclosed and then launched publicly with a soaring poster campaign. The company demonstrated its clothing campaign by modifying its pricing strategy, basically regarding the opening price of its cloths. Therefore, addressing the negative impression of communication the first region was value. For demonstrating its food items within the public arena, M & S took a very much attainable strategy. The foods of M & S were always very appealing. Therefore, unlike its clothing team who actually had to work hard to improve the quality, the company directly approached to the market simply giving its focus on the quality of its food. In 2004 the first advertising campaign of the company towards the promotion of food products was the use of photography of delicious foods with a female voice stating, “this is not just food, this is M & S food” (Thompson, Neal, Threadgould and Trillo, 2006:16). By this campaigning the company wanted to establish the notion in the public that it understands exactly what the public wants. Thus the reception model of communication has been exploited to its optimum for gaining the desired outcome. Applying the publicity model of communication Publicity model of communication rests upon drawing public attention through the proper use of media. It includes all forms of direct and indirect advertising and the concept it based on the notion that attention equals consumption. The model is akin to the term ‘spectatorship’ (McQuail, 2005:72). Interviews, social sites, photos are the tools used to gain attention. For demonstrating its innovation towards the women’s wear, the company has promoted its campaign by the embodiment of supermodels with its products. In September 2005, the company got its confidence back over its women’s wear as it judged that its product was very stylish to attract every woman. M & S took the strategy to freshen the view of women over its cloths so that they feel proud by wearing its cloth. (Thompson, Neal, Threadgould and Trillo, June 30, 2006:9-34). The company spent around $92 million for advertising in the year 2006 (Aitken, n.d.: 6). The black and white advertisement promoting car insurance starred Jodie Kidd. In 2005 this same ad had Dame Shirley Bassey as the star “belting out Pink's Let's Get the Party Started against an elaborate Arctic backdrop lifted straight from a big-budget Bond movie”. Also at a time when different brands are avoiding newspapers and resorting more to other modes, M&S systematically publishes its full-page color advertisements in the national newspapers starring beautiful models like Laura Bailey and Myleene Klass. All these are meant to catch the pulse and the attention of the target audience. Newspapers are still the conventional mode of reading daily news and hence ads published in this media are more likely to catch the eye of the viewers. (Aitken, n.d.: 6) Conclusion The success of media treatment of M & S to come back to the wave of success has clearly told us that communication has contributed to the company in a significant way over its cost to company. This success story is sufficient to tell us that all the communication models of McQuail have been utilized in the strategic approaches of the company. The communication strategies taken by M & S have undoubtedly been able to convey the right message to the public in which they responded accordingly. The integrated marketing communication methodology has been proved more successful to M & S in comparison to the other companies. The success of communication clearly was able to give the message about the company’s success to its customers by increasing its brand equity. Innovative perceptions through communication have been greatly felt by the volume of increase in sales. The successful advertising campaign has emerged as the significant contributor towards the re-evaluation of M & S as one of the biggest retailer by increasing the footfall and rate of conversion. References: 1) Thompson, M, Neal, J, Threadgould, S, and Trillo, L, S (June 30, 2006), This is not just advertising, this is Yours M & S advertising: How confident communications has helped restore public confidence in M & S, Rod Whitehouse, Deutsche Bank. 2) M&S. (May 19, 2009). Press Release, Marks and Spencer Group. Available at: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:AckyIsGzEkMJ:corporate.marksandspencer.com/documents/results_presentations/2009/preliminary_results_2009+At+the+end+of+28th+March+2009,+total+assets+of+the+company+went+up+to+%C2%A3+million+7,258.1+from+%C2%A3+million+7,161.0+as+on+29th+March+2008&hl=en&gl=in&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShsJIQWg01dfw6uxVyfrN_iyf0da8qSx4aSWAeqonbaWLYU2hfSimYqdm1gQ4lyi7cJxrr6Fr2-Px0hN4s7J2HCGkw0I2NAxTsgXKCFGu390DJhqg4Jvb1w-jNWz9WD4zElOknv&sig=AHIEtbTgi1GJju5NAQO5tOIn6aHbirgcgQ (accessed on May 4, 2010) 3) McQuail, D (2005), McQuail’s Mass communication theory, Sage Publication Ltd., London. 4) Aitken, L. (n.d.) Contagious Case Study: M&S, What’s Your M&S Read More