Here’s another blog about one of our MRS Awards nominations – this week, it’s about our Business Impact of the Year nomination as part of the team that helped the M&S Clothing & Home Insight Team improve its style perceptions and then build an innovative customer segmentation that has transformed the way it can target and track its Modern Mainstream customers.
The story of this programme of research goes back to 2020. M&S knew that around 70% of its main target audience in the UK (adults aged 30-70) were shopping in its Clothing & Home departments at least once a year. But too many were in the ‘only shop once or twice’ category – M&S wanted to increase this, and at the same time move perceptions of style up. Having using an age based approach to segmentation previously, they decided to switch to a style based segmentation, so the first piece of work we did was a qualitative study of style within this Modern Mainstream audience which came up with three style types that worked across the age range, and for men and women. We brought these to life with respondent generated photos and video selfies and then quantified it so that M&S could understand the profile of each style type by demographics and attitudes to M&S and competitors. We then explored how shoppers’ style requirements and shopping motivations fluctuated across the year and by occasion. The M&S Clothing & Home Insight team did a superb job of socialising this work across the business and the critical ‘style perception’ score started to tick up – eventually going up +9% in two years.
Next, M&S wanted to make sure that customer metrics were at the heart of its new 5 Year Plan, so they built a new behavioural segmentation over 6 months using millions of rows of internal transactional data, which broke down their customers into six groups based on their frequency of purchase at M&S. Then working with Kantar, they mapped this onto market data to understand which competitor stores the M&S segments shopped in. Then Jigsaw came back in to do another qualitative deep dive – this time into each of the 6 segments to bring them to life to develop recommendations for M&S to help increase frequency of M&S purchase segment by segment.
Finally, it was back to M&S to drive impact. The Clothing & Home Insight team worked with Mindshare to build the segments into M&S’s Media Buying Strategy and they now track the segments in their media data. The Marketing Strategy is now also rooted in the growth segments and they also replicate the segments on YouGov’s BrandIndex panel so that they can cut existing brand tracking metrics by the different segments. The segmentation work fed directly into M&S’s 5 Year Plan and was used in setting financial and market share targets across the business.
Like everyone else we are delighted to see M&S having such success with its fashion offering today and we really enjoyed playing a small part in helping them achieve this success!
If you’re interested in hearing more about this work, do get in touch.
Ann Morgan, Nov 24
English (UK) 
English (United States)