Strategic Management : Marks & Spencer Assignment
Added on 2021-01-21
3 Pages2185 Words68 Views
Leadership Management
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Strategic Management – Case Study 1 Can the Saturday boy change Marks & Spencer? Steve Rowe began his career at British retailer Marks & Spencer at the age of 15, working as a Saturday boy in the menswear department of the company's Croydon store in south London. Later, after four years as a trainee at the fashion chain Topshop left him complaining of lack of career progression, he re-joined Marks & Spencer in his early twenties. He did not tell his father of his plans: Joe Rowe was then a rising manager in Marks & Spencer and would reach the main board of the company in the 1990s. Steve Rowe worked on the floors of several stores, including Marks & Spencer's flagship Marble Arch store, and had a spell in the company's ecommerce business. ln 2012, Steve Rowe finally became a company director, joining the main board that his father had served on a little more than a decade before. Rowe would lead first the successful Marks & Spencer food business, and then the more troubled clothing business before making it to the Chief Executive position in 2016. On the first Saturday of his appointment as Chief Executive, Rowe went back to the Croydon store where he had started his Marks & Spencer career and was photographed with a member of staff who remembered him as a Saturday boy in the early 1980s. Steve Rowe's success had not been unheralded. After all, he had controversially announced his ambition to be Chief Executive as early as 2014, a time when the then Chief Executive Marc Bolland was already struggling for investor support. Rowe's appointment as Chief Executive not only followed the premature departure of Bolland, but involved pushing past two earlier favourites for the position, John Dixon and Laura Wade-Geary. Even after his appointment at Chief Executive, Rowe initially retained his position as head of Marks & Spencer's clothing business. Rowe's appointment was apparently a popular one amongst company insiders and within the industry at large. In 2014, Rowe had won the Grocer's Cup, the prize for outstanding leader in the food retail industry, voted by readers of the industry's leading trade journal. On appointing Rowe as Chief Executive, the then Marks & Spencer Chairman of the business, Robert Swannell, described his knowledge of the business as ’encyclopaedic’. Rowe is known as a stickler for quality, prone to taking photos of substandard packaging and rearranging shelf displays when visiting local stores. He also has a reputation of being a tough-minded manager, with a company nickname of ‘Nails’ (as in the expression ‘hard as nails’). Rowe presents himself as a diehard supporter of Millwall Football Club, a south London team whose fans have traditionally been renowned for their aggression. The challenges at Marks & Spencer In the 1990’s, Marks & Spencer had been the United Kingdom’s most respected retailer, the first to achieve over one billion pounds in annual profits. The company could trace its history back to 1884 (this date is prominent still in its marketing materials) and it had been led by members of the founding families more or less continuously until the mid-1980s. It was originally a clothing business and the company developed a reputation for good quality standard clothing at a reasonable price. Marks & Spencer backed its reputation for quality by always giving refunds on returned goods from customers. A leader in bra design, the company was selling 6.5 million bras per year in the United Kingdom in the 1950s and to this day one in three British women buy their bras from Marks & Spencer. The company entered the food business in the 1950s, and during the 1980s became the first premium supplier of ready-meals in the United Kingdom, famous for such then exotic items as chicken kiev. The company built on its reputation overseas, starting an Asian business with an initial branch in Afghanistan in 1960, entering the Canadian market in 1973, opening in Paris in 1975, and acquiring businesses in the United States in the late 1980s.
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