Today in retail: Spending it well at M&S

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M&S today unveiled its new advertising campaign ‘Spend it Well’ in a bid to jump on the experiential bandwagon.

The advert, which M&S is billing as a “radical departure” from its previous marketing, unites its historically disparate food, clothing and home divisions and is designed as a “call to action” to focus on the “experiences, people and things that really matter”.

With this, M&S is making a clear bid for the experiential, a sweet spot for every department store retailer right now.

It’s a topic that’s been a thorn in the side of Next boss Lord Wolfson for a while: its first-quarter results followed the same pattern as its lacklustre performance last year.

At its full-year results in March, Wolfson warned that this would be another tough year for the historic outperformer and these results bear out that warning.

Also today, Morrisons unveiled a good set of first-quarter results, Asos has terminated its contract with Transline and Amazon is expanding its research centre for drones and its Echo technology.

Quote of the day

“Our ‘Spend it Well’ campaign is a radical departure from where we’ve been previously. To remain relevant and attract new customers, we need to get people thinking differently about M&S and recapture our position as a pioneer in culture.”

M&S customer, marketing and M&S.com executive director Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne