Analysis of Marks and Spencer's Branding and Marketing

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Brand Management
Marks and Spencer
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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
LO1 Demonstration of building a brand and how it is managed.....................................................4
LO2 Analyzation of how the brands are organized in portfolios and these hierarchies are
managed and build...........................................................................................................................7
LO3 Brand Extension and leverage.................................................................................................9
LO4 Measuring and managing the value of Brand........................................................................12
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................14
References......................................................................................................................................15
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Introduction
In this article, the value of branding has been explained regarding the company Marks and
Spencer describing its effects on the company in order to reviving its brand. Therefore, the
Branding and its management in the mentioned organization is explained along with revitalizing
its value within the organization as this organization’s share market plunged to the lowest in
several years and different people commenting about the loss of the company. Hence, this paper
will describes how the organization can use different effective ways to promote the
organization’s brand to regain its health again in the share market by marketing and analysing
different management process.
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LO1 Demonstration of building a brand and how it is managed.
P1 Explain the essentialities of Branding as Marketing tool and how it has evolved in
business.
Branding is practice of marketing in which an organization develops its name, design or symbol
which is easily recognizable belonging to organization. This benefits in identifying goods and
differentiate it from other services and goods (Davis, 2017). In Mark and Spencer, branding is
essential because it not only engrave an impression on the company and its consumers but also
the clients and the consumers to know that what to expect from the organization. It is absolutely
critical to the organizational business because its entire impact that affects in the organization
changes the perception of people about the brand and it enhances awareness of the brand and
drives the business.
There are some points that make branding importance for Marks and Spencer:
 Branding gets and Identification
 Branding enhances the value of a business
 Branding makes new consumers
 It improves the satisfaction of employees along with increasing their pride
 It develops trust within marketplaces (John and Park, 2016).
 Branding in an organisation supports advertising
Developing and growing brand Equity in Marks and Spencer
For Mark and Spencer, developing a successful brand needs several strategies of branding and
creative marketing sense in order to make robust equity of a brand. In recent day’s competitions
in markets, a brand is the only thing that achieve success if it can effective connect with
customers and communicate with them through organization’s identical qualities in such a way
that it can make a positive attitudes in the consumer’s mind. Therefore, the brand equity cannot
be generate by goods and its service by its own because this needs marketers to create efforts that
results in consumers bestowing over the services of the product of its desired image of brand.
P2 Analyzation of key components and steps of making successful brand strategy
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Therefore, there are some key components and following steps that are important for making a
robust brand:
 Introducing quality product into marketplace- This is obvious but it is really essential
to deliver a product which attracts positive customer’s reaction. This is retrieved through
delivery, packaging and labelling and the offer value to the users.
 Managing competitors and trends- Marks and Spencer has the ability to adapt
transformation in the marketplace to say relevant (Giovanniniet al., 2017). In order to
achieve this goal, the marketers of the organisation should have to maintain the trends in
industry and condition of market.
 Developing a consistent image of brand- It is essential to reinforce the brand of an
organisation through providing consistent good experience in the customer’s mind.
 Consistency in messaging the brand- When messaging a brand it have to make sure that
it should have to be easy for the customers for reminding about its product quality and
what the customers care most about.
 Gathering feedbacks of customers- Since, the real power of brand exists in the
customer’s mind, it is important for the marketers to collect and analyse the feedbacks of
customers.
Marks and Spencer observe underlying profits that rises about 4.4% to £729 million in the
previous year while revenues were up 2.8% to £9.7 billion.(Ahmed, 2016). Hence, there are five
point plans to revive and reinforce Marks and Spencer brand, they are as follows:
 Making the new purpose of brand regarding clothing to make the customer’s every
moment special: The Company stated that its success key is through its delivering the
foods, but now it has decided to revive the brand through replicating the products of
clothes as well to attract the customers. The company believes that it will aims the
business minds that what the company is manufacturing and what the customers looks
for. They understand that the customer mainly focuses about the quality of the product
rather than looks (Çifciet al., 2016). Cherishing the core shoppers by an emotional
attachment through providing range of products at any time in a year. Marks and Spencer
observed that only 35% of its shop for both clothing and food, whereas 65 % go for the
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single category. Therefore, in several seasons, customers are attracted by offering huge
discounts on the products.
 Listening to the consumers are the main factors for Marks and Spencer. The company
and its shoppers wanted the company and its product to be ahead of trends. Therefore on
researching about the marketing process within the organization, Marks and Spencer
observes that customers are getting their favourite options regarding the foodsalong with
quantity and quality while in term of clothing the customers are not happy as well
because the company offers variety of choices in clothing but it lacks quality and correct
fashion (Keller, 2015). So, in order to revitalise the company has taken an action to listen
carefully the customer feedbacks and work on them.
 Making the decisions based on strong evidence about transforming the organization into
data driven business unit. The retailer company has it Sparks Loyalty card which
provides the company valuable data of customer visiting and about their keen interests
about the product. Therefore, the organization will revive by ensuring the data utilization
without losing sight of thinking and saying of consumers at the same time.
 Marks and Spencer now focuses on long term reviving of its brand rather than doing
short term selling of products. This has implemented by staffing and upgrading the levels
of quality of products and its services rather than profitability. It represents that the
company’s aims are the consumers and the brand by recovering the clothing department
along with food and home furniture business (Malhotra, Maclnnis and Park, 2015). It
includes the gross score of its promoters evaluating several reviews through its online
website. Marks and Spencer has decided to implement the Information technology
investments to build its website more attracting and improving the store shopping
experience of customers by making user friendly.
So, this way Marks and Spencer reinforce, revitalize and extend their organization to make profit
in their business and improving customer satisfactions.
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LO 2 Analyzation of how the brands are organized in portfolios and these hierarchies are
managed and build.
P3 Analyse different strategies of portfolio management along with Brand Equity
management and Brand Hierarchy
Selecting the correct brand architecture or model is essential for any retail organization in order
to market, manage and organize the brand of the organization. In order to provide baseline
definition, the brand model describes about managing, organizing and marketing of brands
within organization. Therefore, there are several approaches of modelling a brand impacting the
perception of people over business and over the launching of products along with integration of
other brands.
There are three models which will explain its essentialities for building brand for Marks and
Spencer, therefore selecting the best model will be the organizations decision.
 BRANDED HOUSE
With this approach, the master brand is always linked and present to all the products and the sub-
products. This approach provides simplicity, ease and consistency to the management compared
to other structures of brand. Therefore there is only single set of branding components and the
aim is always on that single brand.
For example, for Marks and Spencer utilizing the “branded house” approach, they makes variety
of foods and clothing products that entirely carry the master branding.
Advantage of this approach is that it promotes the advantage of several new goods utilizing that
name of brand. This brand extension lowers the risk of consumers and also reduces the
marketing programs costs (Yu, 2018). Apart from this, this approach has some disadvantages
also. The first drawback is the dilution of brand. A robust extension of brand will often enhance
the entire equity of brand, but bad experience regarding goods and services could corrupt the
entire organization’s offerings.
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 HOUSE OF BRANDS
In this case of house of brand model, every brand stands on its own frameworks. This model
encourages about building and developing independent sub-products and its brands, while the
master brand directs off screening.
For example, Marks and spencer has a brand portfolio which contains foods, clothing, personal
cosmetics products. Therefore, it will be not be an unusual for someone who is using Fiama Di
wills soap in bathroom and Cornetto ice cream in fridge without knowing that Marks and
Spencer even exists. Hence, both the brands are popular in sales in respective categories. Within
this model, these are considered as sub-brands of Marks and Spencer. Isolating these brands
allow each goods and its service to be differentiate from each other.
This model let the master brand easy to diversify their offers and acquiring other brands without
re-branding (Raval and Srinivasan, 2019). In this approach, the financial costs and time,
marketing and identities are enhances while developing brands from scratch.
 HYBRID
The hybrid brand model is the accumulation of several brands organizing planning and strategies
(Sharp, 2016). The advantage regarding this model is the capability to employ the strategies of
individual brand and hierarchies of sub-brands which make more sense for the Marks and
Spencer’s product and service. Therefore, this model promotes lack of consistency of brands.
For Example, Amazon is a company that follows this model that led them utilize the strategy of
corporate branding to leverage the equity of brand in order to promote the first party goods like
Amazon Kindle and Echo.
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LO3 Brand Extension and leverage
P4 Evaluation of brand management both at domestic and global level
Brand leveraging for Marks and Spencer
The leveraging of a brand is a kind of strategy that is used to support an existing brand power for
entering a new business or product category with the help of effective communication related to
the product data that are given to the customers (Mete and Davies, 2017). For example, a
company that manufactures tea starts to manufacture vending machine for tea with the help of its
brand name and strength. In this business, both the products falls into different categories but the
brand name will impact both the customers. As the brand M&S is getting affected in their
existing products and the stores are getting closed gradually, they have start leveraging their
brand name for entering into a new category of product saving their business in near future. As
the brand have a strong brand name, it will be easy for the company to launch new product
categories for the customers (Lukić and Vojteski-Kljenak, 2017).
Brand leveraging of M&S and its importance:
The leveraging of the brand is a crucial thing for launching of new products or product categories
as:
 The leveraging of the brand will carry the positive attributes as well as features of the
brand for entering to a new category of the product.
 Leveraging of the brand helps to provide the customers of the brand with some of the
familiar connections (Wilson, 2016).
 If there is a strong brand leveraging of M&S, then it helps with an easy recognition by
the customers as well as they will as lo try the new leveraged products.
 There will no competition for the market share because the products will fall into
divergent categories.
 The leveraging of the brand name of M&S will enhance the sale opportunities in the
market.
 The introduction of a new product will cost more as compared to introduce a leveraged
product of the M&S.
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 As the number of product will increase, then the efficiency of the raw materials as well as
the manufacturing techniques will also increase.
Strengths and Weakness of Marks and Spencer brand leveraging
This is an analysis of the strength and the weakness of the Marks and Spencer for initiate the
various calculations regarding the facts as well as figures of the business that will help company
for its strategic planning. This analysis is regarding the present situation and to develop the
strategies that can be implemented for the betterment of the future of the company (Çifciet al.
2016).
Strengths of M&S
There are several strengths of the company but in this section the value of the brand for
leveraging of the products will be discussed for the growth of the business and new categories of
the products can be delivered to the customers.
High popularity of the brand name: The M&S brand name is very popular in UK and it has a
positive feedback among the people of UK for the quality of products that the company is
providing to them. The value of the brand is very high among the people those who prefer to
visit M&S in the high street as it helps the customers to shop in a go (Jin and Cedrola, 2016).
Products with huge varieties: Every store of M&S has a huge product variety that helps its
customer for choosing their required product. The company have a strong relationship with the
farmers as it helps the company for getting huge variety of fresh vegetables in all the stores that
will enhance the customer’s experience as well as quality of the vegetables. They also get the
fresh fruits along with the vegetables as they have that kind of connection with the farmers. This
actually helps the company as the other supermarkets cannot provide this kind of variety of fresh
vegetables as well as fruits to the customers (Ahmed, 2016).
Popular designers: The Company have a huge range of popular brands that helps M&S to grow
the customer’s base as well as attract new customers with their quality of the different brands.
For example, the Men’s section has the popular brands like “blue harbour”, “Autograph” and
many more. Similarly, the women section has “Classic”, “Per Una” and many more brands.
These brands of M&S have made the company stronger in customer’s satisfaction.
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Maximum stores: The Company have around 900 stores globally and within UK it has
approximately 600 stores and more than 300 stores in around 40 different countries. With these
huge numbers of stores as well as outlets of the company gives the idea of their business that is
getting wider with the increased number of sales of the company. This is another strength of
M&S that is linked with the increase in the number of the outlets worldwide and all the products
are available to the people within a reasonable price rate as well as good quality.
Weakness of M&S
Bad publicity of the brand:
The Company has a bad publicity regarding the fashion and the trends. M&S is considered as
non-trendy as well as out fashioned by the people in spite of having the large variety of the
products within their stores. Majority of the people have the wrong assumptions for their stocks
of the fashion wears for men and women. They think that they only have collections for aged
people and there is nothing good for the teens. These kinds of wrong assumptions are affecting
their business and making it lower (Islam, 2016).
Increasing of the costs:
The Company is still following the old methodologies and not implementing new techniques to
increase their business. But the other large companies are always trying to update their business
process with new technologies for their growth. This thing is recommended to M&S for
implementing new technologies to reduce the costs.
Collaborations and partnership for the M&S brand
The company have kept the option of partnership in their Plan A. Their various achievements
with the Plan A became possible as they have multiple partnerships with other organizations.
This has a reason behind the partnership, as the company have to gain the knowledge of the
outside market and help their executives for making required changes that are essential for that
market condition (Esposito et al. 2015). As there are multiple collaborations as well as
partnerships, some of the partners will help in the long-run and they will evolve continuously and
some of the partners of M&S will help to indentify the different issues at required times. M&S
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generally works with those organizations that help to share the values as well as objectives to
develop a shared value.
For the partnership of the M&S, there are several aspects that have to be considered that are
follows:
 The business case of M&S has to be demonstrated by them to carry out a responsible
business.
 The partnerships should engage for the reduction of the overall carbon emissions as well
as other greenhouse gases.
 For the manufacturing of the various products, deforestation should be eliminated.
 The sustainability of the different consumer products should be enhanced.
LO4 Measuring and managing the value of Brand
P5 Technique for measuring as well as managing the followings:
Brand Value:
All the brands have different values within the market and the balance sheets too. When any
organization pays a large amount of premium for gaining the brand then it comes under the
strategic decision. The M&S brand will assign a material value for each asset of the company
and the brand value will be paid for capturing a specific brand and this business can also be
considered as asset (Rashid, 2016). One of the best techniques for managing the brand value is a
continuous differentiation in its business. Example of differentiation can be taken by Apple who
has created a difference in their productions challenging the other smart phone brands globally.
Brand Awareness:
With the similar way of different responses for marketing the strategies of the brand awareness
must focus on the procedures of holding the attention of the present customers. The identification
of the customers can be done though an analysis of people visiting the website, responding to the
various announcements as well as shown interest.
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