Last week Marc Bolland, chief executive of Marks & Spencer, emerged from his six-month bunker session with management consultancy McKinsey clutching his eagerly awaited strategic review, and revealed his plan.
Stores will become more 'shoppable'. International expansion will increase. Many of his predecessor Sir Stuart Rose's initiatives, such as selling iPods and TVs, will be reversed.
From a strictly branding perspective, there was plenty to catch the eye, and much that was right. The confused array of M&S sub-brands will be rationalised and clarified, so that shoppers will at last be able to draw a distinction between them. The decision to refocus on the core M&S brand is also sound, since it nourishes all the others and gives customers reasons to engage in the first place.
Even the methodology to determine what the M&S brand should mean was out of a best-practice textbook. Time was taken to review archives from when the brand was at its best. Bolland was diligent enough to talk to surviving members of the founding families - living archives - for their perspective on the soul and essence of M&S. This kind of re-engagement with foundational belief, combined with a progressive understanding of modern consumers, can often help a brand reinterpret its core specialness for the world today.
How disappointing, then, to see all this focused endeavour result in a vapid positioning. According to Bolland, the M&S brand will now be about doing 'the things that other brands don't do'.
This feels more like a staging post than a destination. It's fine to pose the question 'What can this brand offer consumers that its rivals cannot?', but what really counts is the answer.
Here, Bolland is more circumspect, preferring to wrap up the enigma in a neat new slogan: 'Only at M&S'.
At best, this is tautological; like saying, 'We're unique because we're unique.' At worst, it is an empty phrase dressed up as something far more portentous - the marketing version of the emperor's new clothes.
When pushed on the M&S uniqueness, Bolland reached for the comforting platitudes of historic quality and innovation. These might have been differentiators in the brand's mid-20th-century heyday, but they are no more than hygiene factors today. Waitrose in foods, Uniqlo in clothes and The White Company in homewares would all give M&S a run for its money on both counts.
Bolland offers a little more detail on innovations in development - such as waterproof chinos, and a rough-textured pasta that holds more sauce - but these feel like short-term talking points, rather than examples of a sustained approach to breaking the conventions of the sector.
In the UK, most of us have an in-built sense of the retailer as a kind of national treasure, so 'Only at M&S' might work by allowing us to fill in the gaps and defining the brand's specialness for ourselves.
It's a risky strategy, though, and one that by definition will run out of road as new generations of consumers enter the market.
For the planned geographical expansion, into new territories as well as existing ones, the brand will need to be clear about what it offers and why it exists. It's a vibrant, over-supplied, competitive world out there, and consumers will want to know why they should spend their hard-earned cash with this newcomer, M&S. To craft a tight, motivating answer, Bolland may have to get back in his bunker.
Helen Edwards has a PhD in marketing, an MBA from London Business School and is a partner at Passionbrand, where she works with some of the world's biggest advertisers.
30 SECONDS ON ... M&S BRANDS
- Despite being one of the strongest masterbrands on the high street, Marks & Spencer has always been fond of launching sub-brands. Many readers will remember St Michael. Launched in 1928, it was the brand for all M&S clothes and food until it was dropped in 2000.
- Fewer may recall St Margaret, its shorter-lived brand used for lingerie, women's clothes and school uniform.
- In the early years M&S also dabbled with sub-brands for household goods (Marspen) and baked goods (Welbeck).
- Since 2000 the temptation to launch labels in the fragmenting clothing market has been hard to resist: Autograph (2000), Per Una (2001), Blue Harbour (2002), Limited Collection (2003) and Indigo Collection (2009).
- One of the retailer's most dismal sub-brand launches was Portfolio. The intention was sound - a range aimed at the burgeoning over-50s market - but the execution was never quite there and it was criticised for failing to capture the spirit and style of the maturing baby-boomers.