This week Marks & Spencer revealed a new advertising campaign designed to reposition M&S as the fashion brand of choice for powerful, cutting edge women. But data from YouGov Opigram reveals the women who M&S customers actually most admire.
The ‘Britain’s Leading Ladies’ campaign focuses on 12 inspiring women including artist Tracey Emim, actor Helen Mirren, singer Ellie Goulding, Olympic gold medallist Nicola Adams and Save The Children CEO, Jasmine Whitbread. The campaign was shot by renowned portrait photographer Annie Liebovitz, best known for her spreads in Vanity Fair and American Vogue.
M&S has described the campaign as an effort to move M&S into a ‘new era’ with a more ‘confident’ tone. Past campaigns have usually featured a warmer style, with recent M&S adverts consisting in pictures of celebrities like model Twiggy or ‘X-Factor’ judge Dannii Minogue wearing brightly coloured outfits and wide smiles.
However, YouGov's Opigram system allows us to look at which female celebrities M&S customers particularly admire in reality - and it is a very different roll call. An alternative M&S campaign of its real 'leading ladies' would include TV chefs Delia Smith and Lorraine Pascale; comedians Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Victoria Wood; TV and radio stars Sandi Toksvig and Kirstie Allsopp; and of course, Joanna Lumley.
It's not as edgy or striking a list, but more true to the Marks and Spencer brand.
Time for a change?
M&S may be wise to change direction, however.
Using YouGov’s brand perception tool, BrandIndex, we can see that the retailer’s perception scores have significantly declined amongst consumers in the previous two years.
M&S’s overall Index score (a composite of six key image attributes) has fallen from 53.3 in August 2011 to its current score of 44.4.
Furthermore, the brand’s Buzz score, which measures whether consumers have heard anything positive or negative about the brand, has plummeted from 31.5 in August 2011 to its current level of 6.8.
These declining consumer perception scores indicate the importance of this latest campaign in attempting to reverse M&S’s diminishing consumer perception and sales.
But while it will be interesting to monitor the brand’s consumer perception in the next few months, we can also measure the campaign’s immediate impact on Twitter.
Using YouGov’s social media analysis tool, SoMA, we can see that the number of consumers that heard about Marks & Spencer has increased significantly in recent days. On 19 August and 18 August 9.1% and 7.2% of UK Twitter users heard about the brand following the campaign launch, up from just 0.75% on 17 August and 0.96% the day before that.
