Marks & Spencer (M&S) has set itself the objective of trying to change the attitudes and behaviour of its 21 million customers (per week) from a passive and defeatist feeling to a more actively sustainable and more optimistic one. It recognises that for this to happen, it needs to engage with its mainstream consumer base. M&S's approach is about changing consumer behaviour by making it easy for consumers to ‘do the right thing.' M&S has been engaging its customers on sustainability related issues for some time. Its first major push, Look Behind the Label, raised awareness of the key issues on its customer's radar and enabled it to gain their approval to go a little further.

M&S demonstrated strong business action through Plan A, both in terms of getting their own house in order and ensuring they are doing the heavy lifting on its customer's behalf. In order to engage mainstream consumers, M&S then simplified its communications around sustainability to ‘Doing the Right Thing', a hook that has proved to resonate with its mainstream customers. Two initiatives to engage and influence consumer behaviour have been the removal of free carrier bags and the One Day Wardrobe Clear-Out.

Withdrawing Free Carrier Bags

M&S introduced a five pence charge for plastic food carrier bags as a way of encouraging customers to do their part on sustainability and to change their shopping behaviour. Although it's not the biggest environmental issue, M&S decided to focus on carrier bags since it was directly relevant and would touch everyone. To date, nine in ten consumers claim to be using fewer carrier bags, with bag usage in their food halls down by 80 percent.

One Day Wardrobe Clear - Out

M&S's One Day Wardrobe Clear-Out - timed around the autumn season was a successful approach to generate active customer participation on sustainability and reward them for it. The Wardrobe Clear-Out was a strategy to keep customers engaged with the M&S Oxfam Clothes Exchange programme- launched the previous year to encourage customers to donate their old M&S clothes to Oxfam, in return for a £5 M&S voucher. As a result of this initiative, Oxfam received 400,000 garments and M&S achieved an increase in footfall and in-basket sales.

M&S has high ambitions and recognises that it has a long way to go before all customers are actively engaging in sustainability issues. However, its journey so far has hugely influenced customers and competitors alike. Assume that you are the marketing research manager for Marks 7 Spencer.

1. Discuss the target market and positioning strategies for each of the above CB strategies and suggest other segments that M&S might be able to successfully target.

2. How has M&S been able to help consumers shift their attitudes? Is the company taking a proactive approach to managing its marketing environment? How?

3. Based on your knowledge of buyer behaviour as discussed in the module - provide a proposal for an effective consumer marketing campaign for M&S, including the use of social media: Facebook, twitter, blogs etc. Critically discuss different ways to attract and retain consumers using different social media in the UK supermarket industry. (25%)

4. Critically analyse and evaluate consumer and customer management practices adopted by M&S and explain how consumers might react to individualised consumer-organisation interaction.