Michael Marks opened his first stall at Kirkgate Market in Leeds. The signs he used to advertise his penny price point became well known, stating ‘Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny’.
Michael Marks opened his first stall at Kirkgate Market in Leeds. The signs he used to advertise his penny price point became well known, stating ‘Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny’.
Michael Marks formed a partnership with Thomas Spencer.
The brand name Marks & Spencer was born.
Goods were branded with Marks & Spencer from c1900 and Marks & Spencer Ltd from 1903 onwards.
Early own-brand names including Monster, Welbeck and Marspen were also used on a range of goods.
Customers took their purchases away in paper bags printed with a list of all M&S stores and an illustration of our head office and warehouse on Derby Street, Manchester.
The Advertisement and Publication department was set up, and our first known form of advertising emerged, The Grand Annual.
This was a promotional magazine produced until the First World War. It advertised all sorts of items, including products not sold at M&S, from pharmaceuticals to boot polish.
M&S started to expand into the south of England and came into competition with other chain stores.
To reinforce our brand we introduced consistent signage and colour schemes, with ‘Originators of the Penny Bazaar’ and ‘Admission Free’ in gold lettering on store fronts.
An advert in the Grand Annual reads ‘The Penny Universal Providers. Value, Variety, Quality, Quantity are the Firm’s Watchwords. Everybody’s requirements catered for at the price of ONE PENNY’.
We registered the trademark St Michael, inspired by one of our bestselling lines (St Margaret hosiery made by Corah of Leicester) and named in honour of our founder Michael Marks.
The St Michael brand was given to only our best quality products, made exclusively for M&S.
St Michael was later extended to cover more goods sold in store as we improved the quality of all our lines. By the 1950s all M&S products carried the St Michael branding.
Two editions of the Marks & Spencer Magazine were produced. These were customer magazines, sold for 2d, filled with articles and advertising for items available at M&S.
This included St Michael products as well as other brands, like Siro Watches and Cadbury chocolate.
Aspirational colour illustrations showed elegant people in comfortable surroundings.
Illustrated paper bags featuring Art Deco designs helped to cultivate our reputation for quality.
Window dressing developed into a fine art.
Window displays were a platform for promotion, with key messages being the quality of materials and design of products.
They played such an important role in attracting customers that we would sometimes update displays on a daily basis.
We opened new Super Stores, accompanied by a nationwide newspaper advertising campaign featuring the slogan ‘The Family Store’.
Store décor included posters promoting the M&S values of Trust, Quality and Value and M&S clocks appeared outside our stores.
New food departments were opened with the taglines ‘Fresh supplies daily’ and ‘Finest quality – keenest prices’.
During the Second World War very little advertising could be implemented, with store windows covered for black out and paper rationing reducing the size of newspapers.
Much of our wartime clothing carried the Utility Scheme label.
Our Chairman Simon Marks stated, ‘Our trademark, St Michael, is a guarantee of our standards of value and has become a well-known brand throughout the land’.
By this time the St Michael logo was green and contained within a shield shape.
The St Michael logo changed from a simple font to a handwritten style.
We introduced St Michael News, an in-house newspaper-style staff magazine.
Staff were encouraged to take the magazine home and show new ranges to friends and family.
Many stories focused on new synthetic fabrics and manufacturing techniques that provided convenience and quality for customers.
We started to bring food products into the St Michael brand.
It’s thought that the first food product to bear the St Michael branding was Almond Crisp biscuits in 1954.
Our first colour advert outside of St Michael News appeared as a four-page spread in Woman Magazine in May 1958.
Described as an experiment in large scale advertising, the Sales Promotion department estimated that up to 8 million women would see the advert.
All goods sold at M&S now carried the St Michael brand.
The St Michael brand featured prominently on carrier bags and was now descried as ‘the brand name of Marks & Spencer’.
Our advertising stated ‘You can buy St Michael only at Marks and Spencer’.
Our first television adverts appeared in 1959, as more customers now would have had television sets in their own homes.
The adverts were seven seconds long, showcasing Tricel womenswear in partnership with Courtalds.
Later that year several longer adverts appeared on regional and national TV, followed by more extensive TV adverts like the 15-minute ‘Fashion Time’ in 1960.
Cinema adverts were our key form of advertising throughout the 1960s
Our two-minute adverts were often filmed in stores, but we also produced several studio adverts in conjunction with She Magazine.
Our adverts were shown in over 500 cinemas and accompanying images were displayed in store windows.
We started to make jointly produced films focusing on specific fibres.
We worked with the British Nylon Spinners, makers of Bri-Nylon, and with the International Wool Secretariat.
Adverts like On The Town with Acrilan used Broadway choreographers and dancers, and some featured famous singers like Janie Marden.
Our advert Carefree Summer won 2nd prize at the 12th Annual International Advertising Film Festival in Cannes.
It was filmed in Portugal, the first time we’d used a foreign location.
Our adverts had Hollywood-style storylines and reportedly received spontaneous applause in cinemas.
For the first time, celebrity models promoted M&S in print advertising.
Twiggy made her M&S debut modelling our teen ranges, like Junior Miss (introduced in 1965).
We started to use the phrase ‘99% made in Britain’ across our marketing of St Michael merchandise.
Full-colour seasonal fashion supplements were introduced and distributed with St Michael News, often featuring themed photoshoots set in well-known locations.
Our Young St Michael range was introduced, aimed at younger customers.
The brand had its own logo and carrier bags.
M&S food started to gain a higher profile in the 1970s as our TV advertising expanded to encompass our food ranges.
A series of adverts used the slogan ‘Marks & Spencer – we never compromise on quality’ and ‘It’s a pretty good price too’.
We stopped making TV adverts in the 1980s, as very strong sales made expensive TV campaigns unnecessary.
We made greater use of celebrity designers, launching a number of fashion collaborations.
For the first time we advertised in Vogue magazine, reflecting a new focus on high-end fashion.
‘Quality’ and ‘British Made’ continued to be the core messages to our customers.
Print advertising included a series of adverts with the taglines Marks & Step Aside, Marks & Spicy, Marks & Self-Assured, all coupled with the slogan Have you been to Marks & Spencer lately?
The core message to our customers throughout the 1990s was Quality, Value, Service, which featured on advertising, in-store décor and carrier bags.
We phased out the St Michael brand, although The St Michael Promise (M&S’ guarantee of high-quality merchandise) was carried forward.
A new logo and visual identity were introduced. We started to develop a range of sub-brands targeted at different groups of customers, starting with Autograph and per una.
We returned to TV advertising for the first time since the 1970s with the ‘I’m normal’ poster and TV campaign.
Linked to a major resizing project, the main message was ‘you’ll be pleased to hear that if you’re not average, you’re normal’ along with the tagline Exclusively for Everyone.
Christmas 2000 also saw an M&S Food TV advert hit the airwaves.
Magic & Sparkle Christmas TV adverts launched with a cast of celebrities, with the Exclusively for Everyone tagline still in use.
We continued to expand our sub-brands, with Blue Harbour arriving in 2002.
We updated our logo and introduced Your M&S across the business.
The simple addition of ‘Your’ reinforced our customer focus through this new branding.
Our famous ‘This is not just food… this is M&S Food’ campaign launched.
One of the most iconic TV adverts from this series featured the Chocolate Melt in the Middle pudding. When this advert first aired, sales of the product increased by 3000%.
Twiggy returned to M&S, along with a glamorous line-up of stars including models Erin O’Connor and Noemie Lenoir, and popstar-turned-TV presenter Myleene Klass.
These were our first womenswear TV ads for nearly five years.
Our Look Behind the Label campaign across print advertising and store décor featured a number of ethical sourcing and healthy eating messages.
Our Christmas TV advert starred singer Shirley Bassey in a James Bond-style ad, timed to coincide with the cinema release of Casino Royale – the first Bond film with Daniel Craig in the title role.
We launched Plan A and publicised it through a dedicated website, press releases on specific Plan A initiatives, carrier bags and print advertisements.
Pop group Take That starred in our Autograph menswear autumn campaign.
In May of this year we launched our iconic Dine in For Two promotion.
The price remained at £10 for more than a decade.
For our 125th anniversary our branding used the phrase Quality Worth Every Penny across food and clothing, referencing our Penny Bazaar roots.
Our food adverts moved away from the ‘This is not just…’ campaign.
We focused on showcasing food at the heart of family life.
Some adverts featured the line, Trust M&S to come up with that.
We shifted to the Only at Your M&S tagline, focusing on innovation.
Ads featured singers VV Brown and Dannii Minogue, footballer Jamie Redknapp, models Twiggy, Ana Beatriz Barros and Lisa Snowdon.
Model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and actor Ryan Reynolds fronted the Autumn/Winter 2011 Autograph campaign, while model David Gandy became the face of Collezione.
We launched a new womenswear campaign with the tagline For Every Woman You Are, featuring women with different looks, aged from their early twenties to mid-eighties.
Simply M&S, a range of everyday food products and must-have kitchen ingredients that offered M&S quality at great value prices, arrived on store shelves.
The Meet Britain’s Leading Ladies campaign celebrated 12 inspiring British women from diverse backgrounds and professions.
The campaign was shot by fashion photographer Annie Leibovitz and signalled a reassertion of M&S’ quality and style credentials.
The full line-up for the 2013 campaign was: Nicola Adams – boxer, Monica Ali – Award-winning author, Helen Allen – Nurse of the Year 2011, Darcey Bussell – ballerina, Grace Coddington – Creative Director of US Vogue, Karen Elson – supermodel and singer, Tracey Emin – artist and Professor of Drawing, Ellie Goulding – singer/songwriter, Helen Mirren – actor, Laura Mvula – singer/songwriter, Katie Piper – burns survivor and campaigner, Jasmine Whitbread – CEO of Save the Children.
Our Christmas advert revived the Magic & Sparkle campaign with an Alice in Wonderland-themed advert starring Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, David Gandy and actor Helena Bonham-Carter.
Leading Ladies continued in Spring 2014, again shot by Annie Leibovitz, but with a new line-up including actors, a chef and a structural engineer.
The new campaign featured: Emma Thompson – actor, Annie Lennox – singer/songwriter, Rita Ora – singer/songwriter, Baroness Lawrence – campaigner, Alek Wek – supermodel, Rachel Khoo – chef, Lulu Kennedy – designer and Roma Agrawal – structural engineer.
For the first time food and clothing were brought under the same Only M&S brand identity.
We also launched our Adventures in Food adverts celebrating the creativity, craftsmanship and passion behind M&S Food.
Our The Art of… adverts launched in clothing.
This campaign focused on whole product categories and themes across our women’s, men’s, kids’ and home ranges.
The M&S Est.1884 logo was introduced, reflecting the value that we and our customers place on our unique heritage.
Our Adventures in Wonderfood ads featured on TV and social media and focused on healthy eating.
Our Christmas advert starred Mrs Claus, and was created with customers, putting customer feedback at the heart of our strategy.
To help customers feel connected to their local store, our Marketing team began a roll-out of targeted local emails to customers.
The emails included messages with photos of individual store staff.
By June 2018, six million customers had received local ‘store manager’ emails.
We launched our new campaign Spend it Well.
More than just a tagline, Spend it Well was a call to action, designed to inspire and enable customers to make every moment special by focusing on the experiences, people and things that really matter.
This was the first time we’d united our food and clothing divisions under a single tagline and philosophy.
We restructured our previously top-down marketing approach in favour of separate clothing and food functions.
We also began working with TV personality Holly Willoughby. The new campaign Holly’s Must Haves initially centred around a 20-piece edit including a sell-out navy boiler suit.
Holly also featured in our Christmas Must-Haves advert, alongside David Gandy. The ad was designed to be mobile-first and was shared across all our channels.
#MyMarksFave, our social media campaign for colleagues to share their favourite food products with customers launched.
We also debuted What’s New at M&S Food, a series of social media films featuring celebrities Amanda Holden, Rochelle Humes, Paddy McGuiness and Emma Willis alongside Jon Jones, M&S Development Chef.
We reinvented our iconic This is not just food… adverts with a new campaign designed to remind customers that we’re not just about special occasions.
The adverts focused on real-life scenarios with a tongue-in-cheek approach.
Our M&S Insiders launched – 12 M&S colleagues were selected from 400 applicants to showcase our style credentials on Instagram.
We announced that M&S Food would be the sponsor of Britain’s Got Talent, our first ever headline TV sponsorship deal.
November of this year saw the arrival of Re-Marks-able Value, a new way of talking about our great value everyday prices.
Each featured product or range was price benchmarked against key competitors and represents our unrivalled quality and sourcing standards.
Our Go Jumpers Christmas advert showcased our knitwear, featured M&S colleagues and went viral on social media. We followed it up with an extra Go Pyjamas advert.
Meanwhile our Christmas Food advert was set in a market and starred our M&S Food celebrity panel and a Welsh school choir.
We launched our first ever TV ad campaign for our biggest product category – denim.
We sell 15 pairs of jeans every minute, providing every member of the family with the very best denim on the high street.
This campaign encouraged customers to start a #denimloveaffair.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, we highlighted our support for NHS charities with our All In This Together branding.
We produced a range of All In This Together t-shirts in aid of NHS Charities Together, and launched our Rainbow Sale, with 10% of purchase prices donated to the NHS charities.
We purchased the Jaeger brand, products and supporting materials as part of our wider Brands at M&S strategy.
The first collection of womenswear launched in October 2021 with a new look and feel for the Jaeger brand.
We launched Brands at M&S, with the aim of giving customers even more reasons to shop with us.
The first guest brands were introduced from September 2020 onwards (including Nobody’s Child and Early Learning Centre).
The full launch included many more including Hobbs, Jack and Jones, Joules and Triumph.
The Anything but Ordinary campaign marks our biggest marketing push for clothing since the start of the pandemic.
After just one month the campaign of TV adverts, billboards, print and digital publications had been seen by over 38.9 million people.
Our YouTube advert had a view-through rate of 65%, well above the 25% industry benchmark.
We launched our ‘Anything but Ordinary’ Autumn Menswear campaign – our first standalone menswear campaign since 2015.
Captured against the vibrant city of Manchester, we described the campaign as ‘bold, disruptive and embodying the attitude and style of today’s menswear customer’.
