The perception of Marks & Spencer has been transformed in the seven years that Sir Stuart was at the helm. Its Your M&S advertising campaign was central to that, says Charlotte Hardie

Corporate, introspective, masculine, inconsistent. Four words used by consumers to describe Marks & Spencer in 2004. The public didn’t like M&S very much back then, and the retailer needed a transformational advertising campaign to tell people why they should love it once more.

All eyes were on Sir Stuart Rose to see how he would rejuvenate the brand. And Rose’s eyes were firmly on marketing director Steve Sharp to come up with the creative goods for the marketing part of the M&S revitalisation jigsaw. No pressure, then.

Looking Sharp

Of course, there was a creative advertising agency involved in the form of Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe Y&R, but it was Sharp himself who came up with the Your M&S slogan. And part of the inspiration for that came from the most unlikely of sources in the form of journalist, broadcaster and general loudmouth Janet Street-Porter, no less. Sharp read an article by Street-Porter in which she used the phrase “hands off Marks” when talking about the mooted bid by Sir Philip Green. “The idea that M&S was public property - both literally and metaphorically - had quite an appeal,” Sharp said after its campaign launched.

They needed to convince the shareholders and the staff that the company was in good hands, and they needed to make it more customer-friendly and inclusive. Sharp also recalled trips to the retailer from his childhood: “My mum never took me to Marks & Spencer. When I was 4 or 5 she would take me to M&S.”

And so Your M&S was born. Sharp says it moved the brand to being customer-friendly and inclusive, and shoppers viewed the campaign as upbeat and confident. Instead of masculine and introspective, the retailer came across as welcoming and feminine.

Advertising guru Neil Kennedy says that the word ‘Your’ was integral to the campaign’s success. “There are one or two retail brands that are under the skin of the British public. It worked because people loved M&S in the same way that they love John Lewis. When companies lose their way, very few brands have inherent forgiveness from their customers, and M&S is one of them,” he says.

David Roth, chief executive of WPP’s The Store, agrees: “There was a tremendous willingness by the great British public for M&S to be a success again. Your M&S encapsulated the very special yet fast-receding position the brand had in consumers’ lives and magically contemporised it.”

Branching out into celebrity

When Sharp bumped into Twiggy in a Suffolk pub, that led to the idea of using of celebrities to front the campaign. Former M&S chief executive Sir Richard Greenbury says: “There is no doubt that the entire advertising campaign was a very clever one, and the use of Twiggy especially. Yes M&S has younger customers, but using her captured the essence of the core, older M&S customer. She was 60 and looked about 40, and those people wanted to look like her.”

The eclectic choice of celebrities - which over the years has included Take That, Myleene Klass, Dannii Minogue, Antonio Banderas and Jamie Redknapp - has worked, too. Kennedy says: “It’s a constant reshuffling of the pack before people get bored. That’s what fashion is all about.”

With the food part of the business, Sharp recalled after Your M&S launched that the photography wasn’t doing justice to its range of fresh and prepared foods. In fact it was fairly woeful. One lamb dish - a “fantastic product” - was made to look “pretty awful”. A salad looked far too similar other people’s ads in the same media. A plate of strawberries could have been anyone’s.

“We needed to make our food look as if it came out of the very best cookery book. It should make your mouth water,” he said. The aim, with Your M&S, was to point to the quality and the “trust dimension” of its offer.

What’s more, it irritated Sharp that his local store was losing £2,000 every Sunday morning to a “farmers’ market in a dusty car park with third-world hygiene standards”, and noted: “If we’re not a farmers’ market then who the hell is?”

M&S wanted to start telling people about the provenance of its food and about the farmers and producers that the retailer worked with, so it introduced that message into its stores. Even those food adverts that sang the praises of something as straightforward as broccoli or asparagus weren’t just talking about vegetables, they were promoting the entire food offer and making a contribution to the brand as a whole and what it stood for.

Logic behind Your Marks &Spencer

  • It provided a new, empathetic and unifying approach
  • It acted as a manifesto for a new Marks & Spencer
  • It provided a fresh and colloquial step-change in voice
  • It celebrated the relationship people had with the brand and gave the brand back to the people – the customers, the shareholders and the staff

Only for a premium

The Your M&S campaign also very successfully justified the retailer’s premium price tag. Greenbury says: “Rose took the company back to its core principles. It was about value, not about price. Everyone can do things cheaper.” Sharp’s marketing campaign, adds Greenbury, supported Rose’s quality, service and value strategy perfectly. Yes you might walk into a Simply Food store and baulk at the price of a bag of cherries, for instance, but Sir Stuart’s philosophy was that there was a very good reason why they were that price - they were top quality, premium cherries and you won’t find better anywhere else. You can practically hear the dulcet Irish tones of Dervla Kirwan, the original voice behind the food adverts, emanating from these pages. “These are not just cherries, these are…” and so it goes on.

The fact that both the food and fashion adverts were equally effective was a major achievement. Roth says: “It’s not easy to hold together in one campaign food and clothing. Your M&S achieved it.” The ads’ direct effect on the bottom line is measurable. A shirt worn by Twiggy in one ad sold more in a week than any other product in the history of M&S. Before the campaign, M&S sold 17,000 of those mouth-wateringly rich chocolate fondant puddings each week. After the iconic ad aired, it sold 126,000 per week.

The food ads have frequently been the subject of mild ridicule by comedians and aped - in a tongue-in-cheek way - by Morrisons. “But isn’t that great?” enthuses Kennedy. “The success of a campaign is when it’s in the playground. Once it drops into everyday parlance, that’s success.”

And that success made a much needed and very quick impression on the City, shareholders and customers, following M&S’s fall from favour. Greenbury says: “Stuart had to rebuild customer confidence and one way to do that was through advertising.”

Blanket coverage in traditional media was the answer. It was difficult to avoid the Your M&S ads when they hit the screen back in September 2004. It won the Advertising Campaign of the Year award at the Retail Week Awards three years in a row.

It was a genuinely iconic campaign that played a key part in Rose’s M&S revival. Sharp admitted that the overwhelming response took even him by surprise: “If I’m honest I thought it was more than a campaign when we launched it, but I didn’t quite expect that it would take root in the way it really has. It has done everything and more than I dreamed of.”