M&S Don’t Want Your Money
How Purchase Friction is Ruining the Customer Experience
Each year around results time, it has become traditional for a picking apart of the latest set of bad news to emerge from the nation’s favorite retailer; Marks and Spencer. We, as a people, love M&S, as an industry, we love M&S, but the wheels are coming off and the business isn’t listening to any of us. Below are three videos recorded today by our Undercover Retail Friction Reporter: these aren’t set-ups they are just one of a million frustrating shopping trips being made in today’s Marks and Spencer.
That’s Marks & Spencer's unaddressed real problem: sky high levels of purchase friction. The stores, online too, are hard to shop. These levels of purchase friction, at a time when customers have complete freedom to bypass M&S, and any other retailer that makes their life even slightly harder than it has to be; are a retail insanity and it has to be fixed.
New CEO Steve Rowe is a passionate M&S lifer; he loves the business just as much as his patient customers do but I fear that there is a disconnect that slashes right across that relationship. I know M&S spend a ton on customer insight but either the internal team have their eyes and ears closed, or their suppliers are spinning the results wrong.
Between us everyone and their dog has a theory on what’s wrong at Marks; but there is one group who are at least consistent in their criticism: customers. The same customers who are finding shopping for anything but food at M&S a frustrating experience packed with friction.
The M&S food offer is brilliant; everyone knows why they shop it and the promise set up by food at M&S is consistently delivered on: high quality produce and meals, dynamic ranges, classics and new tastes always easy to buy, and though premium everything is priced fairly. The VM frame around all this matches the proposition perfectly; the clean chrome and rich dark tones scream quality and provenance.
And then you try to buy a sweater…
This is purchase friction at it’s most raw. Worse; in the modern retail context of Bonobos Guideshops, Stitchfix, Poshmark, ASOS and Nordstrom Rack it is a rookie mistake. You can afford higher friction if the shopping reward is massive, as in the last example, but in mainstream apparel, you are dead if you make life hard for customers.
What’s almost worse in this example is that somewhere there is an M&S person right now looking at a live sales spreadsheet, today, and doing a fist-pump ‘YEAH! SELLING THOSE LAMBSWOOL JUMPERS LIKE HOTCAKES!’ It’ll be on a PowerPoint presentation by Monday listed as a success.
But it isn’t; by setting up the expectation in the POS images, and then dashing that expectation, on what should be a nailed-on winter-wardrobe staple, what has really happened (and this is the human commentary that M&S miss week in and week out) is that each customer who experiences the nonsense our Undercover Retail Friction Reporter went through, then leaves M&S feeling frustrated and disappointed.
Oh and there’s more on those elusive trousers…
Just read our Reporter’s summary:
‘I think generally, what I, as a lifelong M&S customer, want the store to be saying is, “look, we know you, we know you’re struggling a bit to find clothes that fit and make you look good, but don’t worry, we’re going to make it super simple for you. See, this jumper is stylish and versatile and it goes with these timeless and really flattering trousers or jeans and this easy to wear shirt or even this jacket. You might not be 21 any more but you can still look awesome, and you’ve sorted your winter look in your lunch-break because we know what we’re doing! “ But they’re spectacularly not doing that. It took me the best part of an hour to navigate the store and I although I bought something [a cheaper jumper than the one I really wanted], I came out feeling frustrated and a bit depressed.’
Steve Rowe, as customers; we beg you — commission a friction/reward audit now. Please, we want your prosperity, we love M&S and we want it to work again. But you must address the reality of shopping your stores. They make it hard to spend with you, and that’s a retail crime but it’s a straightforward fix. Other retailers have answered the questions you must now ask of M&S. Let’s talk Steve; watch my online lecture on friction/reward here for more answers www.FrictionReward.com
