Marks & Spencer's Approach to Closing Its French Stores: An Analysis

British people take a positive attitude towards the new products and new tastes. Waitrose has a wide range of articles, selling a lot of products typical and produced in other countries. http://www.waitrose.com/home/inspiration/About_our_product_ranges.html accessed 20/03/2011

The main source of data presented in this paper is the official website of Marks and Spencer. The details of links are provided at the end of this paper under the title of References.

Technology is very important in the retail market. In order to grow your business, make their business more secure and complete with the competitors, Marks and Spencer has to move along with the new technology. To do this they must manage their brands carefully. Major brand marketers often spend huge amounts on

Marks and Spencer Group (M&S) is the premier retailer in clothing, foods and home ware within the United Kingdom. The company’s commitment to quality, value, service, innovation and trust is a key contributor to their success as a high street retailer in the UK. Their current core UK operations centre around three divisions, food, general merchandise (including clothing and home ware), and the financial services industry. Therefore Tesco plc is the prime UK retailer to analyse and compare growth, financial performance and the financial status of M&S Plc in line with other competitors within the same industry.

Part A of this report examines the resources and capabilities of Marks & Spencer (M&S) up to the mid 1990's and how they lead to creating a superior competitive advantage (CA) over all competitors.

Morrison’s is a food retailer which was established in 1899. Morrison’s started off as a stall at a local market in Bradford run by William Morrison and has since grown to be the UK’s fourth largest food retailer. Morrison’s aims to, “attract, motivate and develop people to ensure that Morrison’s becomes the ‘food specialist for everyone’”. In addition to Morrison’s being a supermarket it also offers a range of other services; cafés, recycling, dry cleaning, photo printer, petrol station and pharmacy. Morrison’s is highly customer orientated as they try to provide the best service to their customers by providing them with high quality and reasonably priced items.

Marks & Spencer is a large company listed on various stock markets, which a widely spread operations in many countries. The size of operations of the company and high reputation in the

Marks and Spencer face many ethical issues in their daily activities and these affect the public and their business in different ways.

The Americans were confused whether it was a convenience store or a discount store. (Sonne & Evans, 2012). This was not an American style. Tesco was overconfident that British and Americans speak the same language therefore it shouldn’t be too hard convincing the customers but Tesco didn’t realise that British and Americans have a totally different culture. (Tesco close American strores,2012, para 6). Any business experiencing environmental problems are likely to experience failure, for example Nokia struggled due to rise of smart phones. Tesco’s success in UK was due to its use of consumer data garnered from loyalty cards but that might not be enough for American market to be convinced. Isomorphism states that for a business to be successful it must be able respond to factors of the environment effectively that affects them. Tesco’s did chose a favourable environment to do business because during it research Tesco found that west coast was one of the healthy eating rout. (Geoghegan, 2011,para 25). Somewhere during their research Tesco did forget that America has the highest obesity rate in world at 30.6%. (Health statistics, 2013). Therefore they are the biggest buyers of fast foods in the world. Another important environmental factor Tesco should have used to manipulate the American customers was through heavy advertising. Fresh & Easy should have used sports celebrities to promote the supermarket as one of the

Marks and Spencer (M&S) p.l.c. is one of the largest retailers in the United Kingdom with a selling space of 12.5 million square feet, was established in 1884 as ‘Penny bazaar’. M&S sells clothing, food, footwear, gifts and home furnishings in its 760 stores around the world. The company’s wholly own and franchise stores operates in Europe, Hong Kong, Far East, Australia, Middle East, the Bahamas and Bermuda making a total of 34 countries.

This document/report throws light on the business environment of Marks and Spencers and the analysis of strategic position, strategic direction, success criteria and backed up by future recommendations for the company based on all the mentioned aspects. The frameworks used to analyse the company are:

Marks and Spencer Company is one of the biggest retailers in UK, which it has known by providing the finest qualities of goods and services including clothing, home product, foods and groceries. In currently, M&S Company operates 852 UK stores, 480 international stores and e-commerce platform includes approximately 83,069 employees, while M&S Company is one of the UK’s leading market positions in Menswear, Women-wear and Lingerie products (Mark and Spencer 2016.

Founded in 1884, Marks & Spencer gradually transformed itself from a small booth to a global department store company with multiple channels,

The early 1990 's marked the beginning of a sea change in customer 's expectations with regard to good quality, healthy food. M&S image as a respectable retailer with its focus on providing a wide range of premium foods meant that the M&S brand, where food was concerned, became regarded as something of a luxury.

Marks and Spencer (M & S) was started by Michael Marks and later joint by a partner Tom Spencer in 1884. It is one of the largest British retailers that sold clothes, home furnishings, food, gifts etc. and was formerly known as St. Michael. It has markets in Europe, Far East, America and Asia. The company suffered a series of losses and a dip in the market share from a few years before the stepping down of the then CEO, Sir Richard Greenbury, in 1999. In 2001 the company underwent a drastic strategic change and the