Marks and Spencer

Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management Vol. 10 No. 3, 2006 pp. 282-300 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1361-2026 DOI 10.1108/13612020610679277

Marks and Spencer is a major British multinational retailer headquartered in the City of Westminster, London. It specializes in the selling of clothing, home products and luxury food products. M&S was founded in 1884 by Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer in Leeds. “M&S has grown from a single market stall to an international, multi-channel retailer, selling stylish, high quality, great value clothing and home products, as well as outstanding quality food, responsibly sourced from around 3,000 suppliers globally. M&S have almost 800 stores throughout the UK.” It is the biggest and strongest competitor for Next.

Marks & Spencer is a British retailer with over 800 stores in more than 30 countries around the world. It is the largest clothing retailer in the UK, aswell as being a food retailer. Most of it’s domestic stores sell both clothing & food, and since the year 2000 Marks & Spencer have started to expand into other ranges

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

Primark is a company which sells clothing, accessory, shoes and home products. Its first store opened in Dublin in 1969 and expanded significantly in the later years. In 1973, Primark moved into Great Britain and now have 152 stores in the UK (Primark company website, 2010). Primark as one of the important clothing retailers in the UK, overtaking Asda and became the NO1 low price retailer in 2009 (Hall, 2009).

Marks and Spencer has strong trading relationships across the world. The company is a secular organization embracing all cultures, nationalities, races and religions. They don’t support or themselves to any country, nations, states, Governments,

Marks and Spencer founded in the late 1800’s by Michael Marks and Tom Spencer started out as open stalls all over Britain which grew into one of the largest and most popular retailers in the UK, ‘in 2010 they had 885 stores’. Marks and Spencers gained their reputation in the early 1980s when they adopted a policy of selling only British made clothing and food and started selling under the brand of St. Michael. Also their returns policy which gave cash returns to customers no matter when the bought the item made them popular. Marks and Spencer continued grow steadily and the profitability of the company peaked in 1998 when it became the first British retailer to make profits of £1 billion. However shortly after this the company saw a decline in profits and fell into a bit of financial trouble. With change and the introduction of a number of key CEO’s the company recovered and won back the

* Marks and Spencer currently has 703 stores in the UK with a further 390 stores in 44 countries worldwide (planned space growth of 3% per year until 2015/16). Employs 78,000 people with 21m customers per week in the UK.

Marks and Spencer is one the UK’s Leading retailers with over 21 million customers visiting marks and Spencer stores each week. The company has over 6 hundred UK stores and over 75 thousand people working in the UK and Abroad. 49 % of company’s sales come from clothing and home ware and other 51% sales come from food. First Marks and Spencer store was opened in 1893 in Manchester by Michael Marks and Tom Spencer. In 1903 Marks and Spencer became a limited company. M&S was enlisted as Public limited

Michael trademark. Over the past 130 years, Marks and Spencer has grown from a single market stall to an international and multi-channel retailer (Worth). It now operates more than 800 stores in over 50 territories worldwide across 34 countries with approximately 86,000 employees.

Competitive Rivalry.  Retailers always face stiff competition. The slow market growth for the retail market means that firms must fight each other for market share. More recently, they have tried to reduce the cutthroat pricing competition by offering frequent points, memberships and other special services to try and gain the customer's loyalty.

I am looking at Topshop for this report. Topshop is a very large British fashion store for young women selling fashion clothes, shoes and accessories. There are Topshop stores throughout the UK. The flagship store in London Oxford Street is the biggest fashion store in Europe. Topshop is part of the Arcadia group which owns other fashion stores such as Miss Selfridge and Warehouse. Topshop mainly sells its own brand products but in larger stores it has concessions of other more expensive similar clothes. As well as selling Topshop clothes in Topshop store, they have concessions in large department stores such as Selfridges. They also have a website where you can buy a lot of the Topshop range including shoes and clothes for

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.

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.

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