How Marks & Spencer can empower their staff to help save the UK high street
The Living High Street is our plan to save the UK’s big retail brands with people-led change — transforming the role they play on the high street, and enabling their people to innovate and collaborate.
Part of that is reinventing a store format fit for the digital age. So we’ve taken Marks & Spencer — a hallmark of high streets nationwide — and imagined a store format that remains true to the brand’s heritage, but also meets modern customer needs and serves the local community.
M&S Marketplace
M&S is associated with quality British products. In food, M&S takes new trends and makes them accessible to the mainstream. Across the UK, food scenes are burgeoning — local producers, innovators, small businesses and foodies abound. M&S hasn’t capitalised on this as they could.
So they launch the M&S Marketplace. An edible showcase of the best local and British produce, right from the source.
Every lunchtime, the M&S Marketplace hosts a dozen or so stalls, some featuring local producers and others featuring M&S’ latest delicacies. The place fills up with small groups from local offices, sampling the latest local delicacies, learning about food sources, and choosing a delicious lunch. You can buy food to take home, or sit and nibble there and then.
And in the evening, food vendors are joined by beer brewers, wine merchants and bathtub gin aficionados.
In fact M&S used to do this — it started out as a penny bazaar. It democratises cutting edge retail formats like the Time Out Market and dining clubs, which tend to be out of reach or too niche for a mass retail audience.
It’s unique to the local area. It gives small businesses a chance to test their wares without large-scale investment in permanent retail space. And it drives repeat footfall into M&S and extended dwell time in M&S, driving greater spend per visit.
The Living High Street isn’t real… yet. It’s our plan that could save big retail brands from a slow and painful decline. It’s grounded in driving the metrics that retailers care about — footfall, basket size and first party data. And it’s all do-able today with off the shelf SaaS (software as a service). But what it does require is a transformation of how retailers think about themselves, how they organise themselves, and how they manage their people.
Please share The Living High Street within your organisation and beyond in the hope that CEO Steve Rowe hears about it. Of course we’d love to be part of making this happen — but more than that, we want to see it happen.
Read more:
- What is The Living High Street?
- A day on Living High Street for a working parent, a local business owner, a high street store manager and a local council rep
- How WHSmith, Zizzi, TSB, Thomas Cook, 3 and Yodel can empower their people to save the UK high street
- The principles behind Living High Street
- How to make Living High Street real?
Albion is a creative transformation partner. We’ll work alongside your teams, empowering them to work in new ways, design new services, and unlock new growth. If that’s interesting, please get in touch with our CEO: jenny@albion.co.
